


The Beast of Hoenn

by lostballoons



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)
Genre: AU, Alice in Wonderland References, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Gen, Nuzlocke Challenge, Would You Kindly (Bioshock), gijinka pokemon, influenced by bioshock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2018-03-28 18:22:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 36,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3865036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostballoons/pseuds/lostballoons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight year old Anna stumbles upon the hatch to the underground city, Hoenn. </p>
<p>Based on Nuzlocke play through of Emerald/Alpha Sapphire. The Pokemon on my team have been personified as various characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Down the Hatch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _god bless the child whose got his own_

She spins in an open field, arms spread wide, fingertips scraping the breeze, mary jane shoes clip clopping aimlessly, aimlessly. “Anna, my china doll!” calls her father from their farm house’s back porch. He watches the clouds, grey and all-encompassing, as he waits for her to finish her dance. Funny, he thinks, how rain always arrives on his birthday.

Anna trips over a square of uneven ground and tumbles to a heap; her father laughs, then crosses the field to her, picks her up and slings her over his shoulder. Her shoe flies from her foot. “We’ll get it after dinner,” he promises. To his surprise, she doesn’t cry, nor does her lip even tremble. Her eyes remain trained to her lost shoe as he ascends their porch steps, and as he sets her down. “Mama will want to fix your ribbon,” he says, tugging gently at her ponytail. “Wait here while I fetch her.”

The door swings shut behind him. Anna peeks through the window, watches him pass through the kitchen and up the creaking stairs. She brushes off her dress, then squints out into the field. Her shoe worries her, but-! A rustling, a traveling patch of grass shaking in the field. She claps her hands together as she finds a small white bob of a tail slipping through the grass. She sets off after it, little limbs flailing and ribbons streaming behind her. She leans forward, grasping with small fingers for the illusive rabbit, when she stumbles, crashes face-first into the dirt. 

After a few moments, she sits up. Her knee already blooms purple. She stares at it for a moment, wondering if she’s becoming a wildflower or worse, a deceptively beautiful weed. She’d rather not be named a nuisance, then yanked from the ground and thrown in the garbage-and especially not on her father’s birthday! Anna bites her lip. A rounded edge pokes into her thigh. She stands shakily, then looks down at her twice-tripper.

A handle, poking out from the grass and thin dirt. Anna kneels down, gray eyes wide. She pulls it upwards and nearly shrieks at its ungodly creak. Beneath, darkness, and the slight silhouette of a stairway. A trapdoor! thinks Anna, just like in mother’s bedtime stories! She brushes the soil and grass from the door’s surface, then examines the words printed upon it. It takes her a minute to decipher them-she’s the worst reader in her class, and often ashamed of it. “City of Hoenn.” She mouths the words carefully, searching for meaning but finding none. “For our favors, our endless fortunes.” She glances back at the farmhouse. Her mother’s back is in the window; a breeze pulls its shutters shut. They can wait for a few hours, can’t they? As long as she returns before midnight, the birthday cake will be perfectly on time. And besides, what parent would begrudge her for a little adventure? 

Anna smiles to herself. She pulls the trapdoor open, and lowers herself into the darkness.

As the latch clicks shut, a light flickers on. Between flittering flickers, Anna makes out a torn, yellowing label on the bottom of the door. “Latch broken. Imminent Inspection Necessary.”

She begins her descent carefully, clutching onto the slimy railing, feeling out each next step with her shoed foot. Once she nearly steps on a mouse, and clamps her hand over her mouth to smother her scream. For some reason, she feels any word, any jumbled scream will sneak through the cracks in the gray concrete walls. She’d hate for father to hear her. He'll be angry, she realizes, that she's missed his birthday supper. He'll tell her she’s been a bad girl, sneaking underground with only one shoe on. Perhaps she’ll be sent to her room without supper or given one of her mother’s “talks” when she returns-ugh, just the thought sends Anna into shudders!

At the bottom of the stairs is a steel door, rusted at the edges, a faded message engraved into its middle. There’s a leak in the ceiling; it drip-drops on Anna’s red ribbons. “Our children are our future,” she reads aloud, taking no notice of her sagging ribbons. The next line. “Steven Stone.” Anna ponders this for a moment, then turns the doorknob.

A thin light spreads over gray floor tiles, breaking through tattered, red curtains. An animatronic voice. “Welcome to Hoenn’s Rustboro District!” It continues, spewing something about employment opportunities, an abolished luxury tax, a grand reveal, but Anna has plunged ahead, shoving curtains from her path. She stumbles over a toppled potted fern, trips in a puddle of an odd, green liquid oozing from a pipe protruding from the wall. Yet she wobbles forward, pushing past the final curtains and-gasp.

Beneath her lays Hoenn. Beneath her lays everything.

A great brick city circling a center lake and its revered tower, then sprawling into rings, and rings, and rings, until they grind up against the great earthen rocks, who lock the city’s growth within them. Neon signs light the landscape, revealing empty streets and their newspapers laying undisturbed, windless, in their gutters. Massive billboards advertise impossible products, whose names Anna can barely decipher, let alone pronounce. Most are plastered on the side of factories, many of which stand near Hoenn’s edges. Their smokestack smog conceals the ceiling. Surrounding the lake, skyscrapers climb upwards, but only the lake’s grand tower, pristine white and still glistening despite the smog, scrapes the surface. On its outside, spiralling stairs lead to many padlocked doors. Anna wonders, briefly, what lies behind them, then returns to the view. She’s never seen anything so massive, so silent.

There’s a slight scraping somewhere in the room. Anna tears her gaze from the window, glances behind her. Only tattered curtains, hanging tiredly in the dead air. Something’s in the air, a small black dot circling around the tower. She stands on her tiptoes and presses her nose into the glass. It’s coming closer; Anna makes out wings stretched thin, like a bat’s, and an elongated neck. Its eyes are large, lizardlike, but its nose and mouth are all too human. Thin hairs travel behind its head. It’s coming faster now, wings flapping rapidly. Its body is large, scaled, its flight majestic, yet somewhat frenzied. Anna widens her eyes. It reminds her of a book her mother read to her, and her father left it in Kansas, Kansas, the book…

“Are you an angel?” asks little Anna.

The glass shatters. The neon glints off its knife fingers, the dagger teeth lining its gaping mouth gnash, and it rushes, rushes, and then, oh god--


	2. Swimming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _something's wrong when you regret  
>  things that haven't happened yet_

Fuzzy dumpsters morph into months unscrubbed tile; overhead skyscrapers merge with the factory smokestacks, looming and bending inwards, forming a blurry canopy over the underground city. Colors flash across the brick and concrete and the dead hanging curtains, bright white and lush pink orbs glimmering over the dull stone ceiling. Anna lays on her side. One arm twists behind her; the other flops uselessly in front of her nose. Her head is sticky. She attempts to lift it-a sudden shock of pain! She cries out sharply, then whimpers. She can’t feel her left leg, only a pounding crescendo of agony, and all the while the city bends over her, the empty advertisement eyes watching her, growing larger and larger; their pupils nearly blot out the ceiling. Through the ringing in her ears, Anna hears the dull flapping of wings and a wordless, strangled cry-a banshee’s, she thinks, or a mama cat birthing. Bricks crash to the ground a few feet away, and plaster showers her face. She thinks she hears the slap slap of a tongue against tile. Specks of white dot her vision, flashes of bright swimming orbs. 

Then, again, darkness.

++

Soft, scattered footsteps around her feet. Viewing the world through a grainy, blurred filter, head throbbing, she glances up. A caricature of a child, his head far too large for his dwarven body, his cheeks bloated as though filled with sweets, stands over her. His stocking cap slouches to the side. He shuffles to her feet, then squats, cocking his head to the side. He lowers his head, smells her shoeless foot, bent grotesquely at a 45 degree angle. It takes him a moment to rearrange himself afterwards. “It smells like my mother’s perfume,” he says, his voice throaty and warbling. “Don’t worry, the angels will find you too.”

“Angels,” repeats Anna, but she’s slipping away again. Her lips flubber open and shut. She gasps for air. Her head pounds; bright lights crowd out the ceiling and the boy’s face. She notes its current location, now hovering inches above her nose, by mere sensation.

“Your face, though. It’s too ordinary. You’re an average bear...so dull and bleeding”-he pauses-” but how will your family survive without you? You are their legacy, and they loved you very much, until you abandoned them, stupid surface child”-he pauses again, looking up into the sky-”But it’s okay. Each family finds its black sheep in each born child...” The boy draws back. “Well, dead girl? Do you value your life as they have?”

Anna nearly chokes on her next breath. Blood drips in her eyes. She wonders if she’s lost her ribbon, but the world is fading fast. Only the boy’s beady eyes remain, squinting down at her gasping mouth.

“Do you value your life?” repeats the boy.

His eyes swim in a sea of neon lights. “Y-yes,” breathes Anna.

His eyes narrow. He’s fumbling his pocket now. His stubby fingers pull a syringe from his pocket. An orange, fizzing liquid sloshes inside. A label obscures the barrel’s center. One word, beginning with T, ending in a C? Her vision blurs once more. She whimpers. The boy frowns. “Weakness will soil their name.” 

He stabs the syringe into her arm, and she screams, and her body's on fire and she sees it all too clearly, sees her index finger curling downwards, its nail extending and blackening, the tops of her hands bubbling and burning and churning in upon themselves, feels her legs straightening then contorting forwards. She gasps. The boy has vanished and she is dying, she’s sure of it. Her vision blasts red, then, as her ears ring like crashing gongs, clears. The advertisements-she sees them clearly now! Bright grinning families, mothers stabbing needles in their sleeping childrens’ arms. “Our children are our Own.” “Pain today, paradise tomorrow.” She screams as her nose hooks and the first feather stabs through her shoulder. Her vision clouds, then darkens, darkens, darkens…

“Don’t be a slave, child,” she hears the boy’s muffled voice as she fades away. “Become your own.”

\---  
Anna awakes in a scratchy bed, in a room lit only by a single lightbulb. Across the narrow room she spots an antique vanity, decorated with various empty perfume bottles. Beside it is a series of pegs-coat hooks, she reasons. On their right, an oak door. She blinks, lazily, looks up. A spider crawls along a crack on the ceiling. She yawns, then quickly snaps her mouth shut; her throat immediately burns. Anna groans stupidly-another rush of pain. She whimpers and lays her head to the right. 

On the nightstand lays an empty ashtray, and beside it stands a small black and white photograph. In it, a thin-faced man lounges on a plush couch, his legs crossed, a glass of wine dangling from his left hand. He wears a pin-striped suit; his tie is partially undone. Beside him sits a woman-his wife, Anna presumes. Her eyes stare slightly to the left of the camera. She wears a rose corsage on her wrist. She crosses her feet at the ankles and purses her full, pale lips. Behind them gapes a massive window, forming a gilded grate over rolling, manicured hills. Anna imagines they’re green, and the woman’s corsage is a brilliant red. Perhaps they’re fighting, she wonders. The pin-striped man’s made a bad business deal, and he’s lied to his wife about the whole cerfuffle, but she smells his lies in the overflowing ashtray on their coffee table and tonight’s cheap wine. 

_Move the story forward_ , thinks Anna. Her leg twitches. She cries out, then grits her teeth. _Move the story forward_. They have three boys, all of whom have their own personal greyhound. They take family hunting trips, whoop as their dogs pursue rabbits over their rolling hills, and laugh as they wipe the blood from their heels on the freshly-cut grass. They’ve missed their past two trips. The pin-striped man conceals his dwindling finances with shoddy excuses-there’s a big storm coming, an important call, the dogs look sickly. The oldest child-Anna has decided to call him Jerry-demands a vet visit, but again, the pin-striped man plays it off. He can barely afford to pay the servants as is. Anna’s finger flexes involuntarily. She cries out again; her throat burns. A trail of smoke seeps from between her teeth. She’s coughing now, and the smoke keeps sputtering. Her hand jitters and her fingers spasm. Creeping from beneath the covers, the tip of a black, hooked claw..

A knock at the door.

Anna’s ears ring, her vision swims, and she’s off, off, gone again.

++

Her teeth chatter. She’s not sure how long she’s been sleeping, but the lightbulb’s burned out and her skin feels as though it’s been stretched tightly across her face. Her index, ring, and middle finger seem longer than before; Anna flexes them. Again, the pain. Again, the swimming.

++

The lightbulb has been replaced. Her eyes blink open slowly. She sits up. Her head aches still, but manageably so. Eyes fluttering shut, she brings her hand to her forehead, but shrieks at a sharp, slicing pain to her temple. Anna’s hand flies to her lap, and she gasps. 

From where once the index, middle, and ring finger’s stubby, dirt-rimmed nails sat grow long, black, curved talons, arched like the rise and fall of a hand-crafted blade. Sandpaper rough, corpse gray skin, occasionally disturbed by flecks of black, circles her fingers from the fingertip to the knuckle. Pinkish red burns swirl across and consume her hand; occasionally, the flesh beneath them bubbles. 

Anna stares at her hand for what seems like hours. On her pinky finger, small specks of pink nail polish remain. It had been two weeks ago, thinks Anna, shutting her eyes and wishing the horror away. Yes, two weeks prior to her descent into Hoenn, her mother had painted her nails by the fireside. There had been reports of another bombing, and Anna’s father was listening for the location intently. To silence Anna (who’d been whining about the howling wind the entire night, and whose voice combined with that wind easily drowned out the reports), her mother painted her nails. They in whispers reviewed what must’ve been a dozen colors, all scattered haphazardly across the worn coffee table. A rich, male voice played their background accompaniment. His quick-tongued warnings rolled off Anna’s wet nails; his diligent reports fell on her distracted ears. And all the while, her mother grew paler.

Anna bites her lip. “Where are my hands?” she whispers to herself. Carrying the heavy, deformed hands of a sharp-clawed monster, she pulls herself from bed. Her feet are bare, she notices, and cold against the wood floor. Someone has arranged her shoes beneath the nightstand. Her socks hang from pegs across the narrow room. Her dress, the same as she entered Hoenn in, smells of dried sweat and must. Using her thumbs (her only “normal” fingers) Anna pulls her socks from the pegs and yanks them on her feet. Her throat tickles. She reaches for the doorknob, but pauses, stopped by a sudden burning in her throat. She draws a deep breath-for a moment, the pain passes. Then, a cough-and a sputtering of fire-erupt. 

The door flies open. A tall man with narrow shoulders hunched up to his jaw rushes in clutching a ratty blanket, and begins beating it madly at the flames on the floor. Dazed, Anna plops onto the bed, and rests her head on her knobby knees. He glances at her with narrowed, black rimmed eyes, then returns fervently to the beating. His ears, somehow pointed and sporting a thick tuft of black fur, flop slightly. His face, too, Anna thinks, has an excess of hair coating its surface and protruding from his nostrils. It comes in three colors-caramel, dark brown, and a sandy tan. His lips purse as he stomps on the last embers with his shined, black wingtips. “How much Own did Brendan give you?” he asks. His voice is lower, scratchier than Anna expected.

She blinks. “Own?”

“Excuse me.” The man sighs. “Let’s try this again: recite your most recent memories.”

“I discovered a latch in the field behind my house,” says Anna. She bites her lip. “I went down the scary stairs and looked out the window and saw something big in the sky. I don’t think it was an angel.”

The man’s eyes nearly bulge from his eye sockets. “You say you found a latch?”

Anna nods.

“By god, I thought they’d sealed the whole city off,” the man breathes. He shakes his head, rubs his temples with long, oddly hairless fingers. “Again, excuse me. Did anyone send you here? Does the latch still open?”

“It clicked behind me”-the hairy man sighs-”and, um, my father sent for me while I was playing. We were going to have supper.” Anna furrows her brow. She cries out. “I missed his birthday! And with these ugly... _hands_ , how could he love me now?”

“Only a child,” whispers the man. “No savior, merely a child”-he clears his throat-”Excuse me, I forgot to introduce myself. I am Harry Hart, formerly chief clerk of Hart Family Machinery. And you are?”

“Anna Marling.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Anna. I expect we will be spending many weeks together-don’t look so shocked, your real family probably believes you’ve been kidnapped and murdered by now. Stop crying, Anna. Hoenn has no room for weakness. Ah, um”-he pats her head as she sniffles-”there, there. Sometimes I forget that even Hoenn children begin as children. Please excuse my poor judgment.”

Anna bites her lip, wrings her hands together, and nods. She fears that any words she utters will transform into pitiful howls. 

“Thank you. I appreciate that. Now, I believe we must get a few things in order. First, you have been entrusted to me by virtue of my deceased wife’s altruistic reputation. I presume you don’t know your savior, and frankly, neither do I. We will not trouble ourselves over his identity, understood? Second, I have cared for you for approximately three weeks, and I believe you owe me $200 for the rug you’ve so carelessly just vomited on. Third, I will act as your guardian until you’ve been sufficiently trained in rudimentary survival skills and prove yourself sane enough to manage your Own and a personal safe house. Any questions?”

Anna’s lip wobbles. “I want to see my mom.”

“Well, Anna,” says Harry, standing and wiping his hands on his pants. He scowls, then, seeing the tears rushing down her small face, smiles sourly. “I’m afraid you’ve just sealed the last latch to to the surface."


	3. Welcome to Hoenn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _coming up behind you always coming and you'll never have a clue_

During her first month with Harry, Anna settles into his strict routine. At eight in the morning they eat breakfast-usually cereal poured into an odd, pinkish milk, at eight thirty Harry washes, and at nine, Anna takes her turn. At ten, they begin reading lessons. In the cramped living room, Harry sits cross legged on the couch and shuffles through a crate of faded picture books. “Surface books,” he clarifies to Anna each day. She, knowing nothing but, always must stop herself from rolling her eyes. As he reads to her, her eyes wander the peeling paint on the walls-once garnished with an ornate, gold pattern, now flakes in soured yellow-green streaks. An empty copper picture frame hangs in the wall’s center. “Where did the picture go?” she asks Harry on the thirtieth day.

He scowls. “We’re reading, Anna.”

“Was it pretty?”

“Not anymore,” retorts Harry. “Shall we return to our lessons?”

Anna sighs and wishes windows lined the walls.

At eleven they pause for a lunch of baked mushrooms. They taste as though they’d been picked from a sewer, but Anna swallows her grimace. At eleven thirty, they move to the outside hallway to begin Anna’s Own lessons. She typically gives up within minutes, and today seems no different. First, she stalls. Anna asks if the landlord would mind the impending scorched carpet, Harry simply shrugs. “He died at the Christmas dinner,” he says. Anna’s eyes widen. She begs him to tell her how he died and to share his story, but Harry refuses to elaborate.

The hallway is illuminated only in neon shades of pink and green, piercing through cracks in the floor length drapes. Only their footsteps crack its silence. Her hands tremble. “It’s okay,” says Harry, “they’re usually only active at night, and if you’re lucky, you’ll sleep through it all.”

“I don’t understand this place,” says Anna. 

“You don’t have to understand it. You just have to survive in it.” Harry takes a few steps back; his footsteps echo through the hall. “You were injected with a fire solution, yes? Was it single or dual typed?”

“I don’t know,” says Anna. “He called it Own.” The hallway feels as though it’s closing in on her, its ceiling scraping her red hair, its walls pressing into her arms. Her breathing quickens, and all of the sudden, she needs her farmhouse, her mother’s sharp reprimand and a slice of cherry pie. She needs the sky, the wind, even the mosquitoes, of the surface. 

“Yes, well, that would be obvious.” Harry wipes his palms on his pants. “Then we will work with what we know. See those claws? They’ll become your best friend in a fight. You’re lucky-most elementals have to survive using almost exclusively dangerous powers.”

“But these claws...they’re hideous.” Anna’s voice shakes. “They’re like a monster’s.”

“That’s irrelevant,” Harry snaps. “Elemental powers can destroy an uncontrolled environment. Those fireballs you coughed up yesterday could destroy a forest, or scorch the face of a friend if fighting side by side.”-noticing Anna has turned slightly green, Harry grimaces-“Those claws are much easier to control than a raging forest fire.”

Anna stares blankly. 

Harry groans. “Slash the bottom of that drape,” he says. She sways on her feet, and he, taking it for indecision, snaps, “It’s not a crime if you’re not punished.”

Anna kneels over and drags a claw through the fabric. An massive, spider crawls out from behind it, and she screams. A sudden crashing from an apartment down the hall. “Goddamn it,” mutters Harry, dashing to her. He throws a hairy hand over her mouth and yanks her behind the drapes. From down the hall, the ancient, lagging creak of a wheezing door. “Be silent and don’t move,” he whispers hoarsely to Anna. A beetle scuttles across the window, its alien legs pausing inches beside her face. The drapes press into her face; a musty, rotting smell fills her nostrils. And all the while, heavy, dragging footsteps shake the floor. The floor tremors and creaks as the beast walks nearer, accompanied by a thin, metal scraping across the opposite wall. Harry stands completely still; unknown to Anna, his heart races as if clawing its way from his chest.

The creature’s heavy breathing fills the hall. Its massive footsteps shake the windows, the floors, the very walls. Inside Harry’s apartment, the picture frame crashes to the floor. Harry holds his breath. Anna nearly bites his finger. Her small fingers curl, and her talons nearly scratch the glass. A massive footstep sends the beetle dropping onto her bare arm. Anna lets out a shrill shriek. Suddenly, silence. 

Harry’s nails dig into her face. Anna begins to cry, noiselessly. The scraping screams across the floor, stopping a foot from Harry’s shoe. Again, the silence. It hangs through the air, slipped violently over their throats, like a tightened noose.

A few minutes pass.

There’s a shriek from the ground. The deep wheeze of aching metal blows through the hallway, and the thin, harrowing scraping drags pass their feet, and towards the skywalk exit at the end of the hall. The floor shakes grow lighter as the creature passes, and even the walls seem to breath a sigh of relief. After hearing the door click shut, Anna bursts from the drapes and vomits on the faded red carpet. Harry steps out once she’s finished. His hands tremble, and his dark brown eyes dart from the closed door to his apartment. “We’re running low on cereal,” he says, voice shaking. “Tomorrow, we’re going to run errands, okay, Anna?”

That night, he shakes a few pills from a bottle beside the stove. He instructs Anna to take one, and takes two for himself. 

++

The next morning they set out early, though in the always lit underground city Anna cannot discern the difference between dawn and evening. Only Harry’s miracle watch, named such for its seemingly endless battery, betrays any hint of time passing. Harry walks with a bounce in his step, humming a jazz house tune to himself. Anna’s grip tightens on her pillowcase-carried at Harry’s insistence, slung haphazardly over her shoulder. “Shhhh!” she hisses. “That thing’ll find us again!”

“Highly unlikely,” says Harry. They take a left. At the end of this next hallway, a skywalk exit. To Oldale Apartments, it reads. “It’s more probable we’d be impaled, or become another stain on the ground level pavement.”

Anna pales. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I want to go home.”

Ignoring her, Harry slides open the door to the skywalk. Anna trails closely behind Harry as they pass through the walkway-the floor length windows reveal the twelve stories between them and the grimy floor tiles, where she can still picture herself, a crumpled heap under the neon lights. Thankfully, the grand, sky-reaching tower is barely visible, and its great and terrible beast haunts another district today, Anna assumes. She glances up; Harry’s humming has stopped. In the distance, black smoke balloons from a third story window. Anna wonders if a horse has kicked a lantern, or if an unfortunate family’s stove has malfunctioned. “It used to be Joe,” says Harry. Anna jumps. “Excuse me, I didn’t mean to startle you. But the creature from the hall--it was Joel.”

“Is he a monster now?” 

Harry pauses toward the end of the hall. He rubs his temple and stares out over the city. “No, just...unfortunate. Had I taken the same brand of Own as he had…” Harry shakes his head. “You’re too young to understand the mechanics of it, so please excuse my vagueness. Own, as you might’ve observed, doesn’t mesh well with adults. It requires an undeveloped mind and the ability for physical growth in all but its normal typed solution. Even when its subject is young and fresh, it still may not integrate smoothly, depending on the user and the brand of Own. You and I are lucky. We made it through alive and relatively intact.”

“Where does it come from? How does it work?”

He turns to her, offers a grim smile. “I don’t know. All I tell you I’ve learned from experience and observation.”

“Are you a normal type, then?”

“Yes. The syringe read Zigza-something.” He turns sharply, and pushes open the antiquated, scratched doors of the Oldale complex. “But let’s speak no more of this subject. We’ve got errands to run.”

Anna nods and follows Harry through the doors. Royal navy, stuccoed walls greet them, gleaming and decorated with pinkish-yellow sunspots reflected from a hanging chandelier, mirroring sunlight patching through a feathered canopy. They dash partially across the two halls adjacent to the miniature-lobby. Golden signs shine from the walls, providing nearby ranges of apartment numbers and a quick note on emergency etiquette. Harry examines them for a moment, then takes off briskly down the right hall. Anna jogs to keep up, and nearly crashes into a tipped over room-service cart in the process.

Harry shushes her. “This place is full of old money,” he whispers, “and old money likes to wake up unnaturally early.”

Anna bites her lip. She nearly wrings her hands together, but slaps them to her sides when she feels the first, always unexpected scrape of her talons. 

Harry checks each passing door meticulously, reading first the room number, then gently nudging it, and as a final resort wiggling the doorknob. Anna notices her claws have made small holes in the top of the pillowcase, but, fearing the appearance of another terror, remains silent. 

Finally, he discovers a door slightly open, and follows their trail of light inside. Anna slips in behind him; she closes the door softly. Only a sliver of light from beneath the door illuminates the room, and it reeks a putrid, sickeningly sweet scent tinged with sharp hints of mold and rot. “Why are we here?” Anna whispers, pinching her nostrils shut.

“Now, I’ll have you know that I’m a respectable businessman,” replies Harry grimly, “and when a relative dies, any respectable society member would tell you that the first stage of grief is claiming your rightful inheritance.”

“Someone died? Your family died?” Anna’s knees wobble as Harry takes a sharp breath. She collapses onto a plush sofa near the doorway; dust poofs from its cushions. “Harry, we can’t steal from the dead.”

Harry stiffens. “Everyone’s one big, dysfunctional family in Hoenn. I’m just claiming our inheritance.” He shakes his head, then quickly steps over a pile of photographs strewn across the floor, and turns sharply around the corner. His footsteps pause for a solid minute, then continue hesitantly. Anna pulls her knees to her chest as he peruses kitchen cupboards. She feels as though invisible eyes stare condemningly at her, watching from just around Harry’s corner, from the top of the bookshelf, from behind the coffee table’s lamp. She shudders. It’s cold in the apartment, too cold, and oh, how she hates to be alone. “I’ve found some canned food and dried fruits,” Harry whisper-calls, “but I’ll bring them to you. Don’t pass the corner, Anna, please.”

“Why?” asks Anna.

Harry edges around the corner, the few hairless patches of his face noticeably greener, his arms wrapped around a bag of fruits and multiple cans. He nods his head, and Anna holds out the pillowcase. He dumps his loot inside. “They’re all dead,” he says, shuddering, avoiding Anna’s eyes. “A family of four, two kids. They’re sitting around the kitchen table. They’ve, ah, ended things on their own terms.”

Anna gags and throws a hand over her mouth. “I want to go home,” she cries, voice hushed, shaking, “I want my mom and dad. Harry, Harry, take me home, please, please?”

“The only way out’s Sky Pillar, and God knows that place has been sealed up for nearly a decade,” he sighs, then pats Anna’s shoulder awkwardly. “I’m sorry I told you about this, and brought you on my errands, and I’m sorry you discovered our city. You’re too young for this place.”

He returns to the kitchen. Anna buries her face in her knees and attempts to picture her mother’s weathered, perpetually furrowed brow, but cannot conjure her face. She stabs her left hand into a couch cushion, biting her lip and watching the hot tears drip down her calves. “I don’t know anything,” she mutters to herself. “I’ve lost my family and my house; this place is an awful nightmare, but I don’t have the fingers to pinch myself awake.”

She glances up to see Harry standing at the end of the hallway, arms carrying another load, eyes fixed on the macabre table scene. “Those poor kids,” he whispers. He leans back and meets Anna’s eyes, and she sees his sadness, bloated and near-bursting from his pupils. “Let’s go,” he says after a moment, lowering his gaze. Anna stands shakily as he tosses another armful of goods into the sack and slings it over his shoulder. She stumbles towards the door, and he reaches for the lost child’s hand, but recoils quickly at remembrance of her unnatural fingertips. He sighs.

They shut the door behind them. They stand outside the room for a moment-Anna grasping for words, Harry for new direction. _I bet they were really lovely kids_ , thinks Anna, and she bursts into tears. “Hey,” whispers Harry, “I know what will get your mind off things.”

“Ice cream?” Anna sniffles.

Harry cracks a grin. “Have I ever told you about my daughter?”

“Is she pretty?”

“She lives a few halls over. She’s quite the character.”

“What’s her name?” 

“Janis. She's a singer.”

“She sounds lovely.” Anna smiles weakly.

“We’ll see,” says Harry. They navigate through a brief maze of all-too similar hallways and chandelier dappled walls, growing slightly dizzy from the consuming sameness, before stopping at an unusually colored door. From the sliver between the door and the carpet, soft jazz escapes. Harry stands motionlessly for a moment, holding his fist centimeters from the door. Anna tugs his sleeve, stares up at him with bloodshot brown eyes and a tearstained face.

Harry sighs deeply, then knocks.


	4. Janis Hart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _What I know is what you know is right  
>  In the city it's the only light_

The music abruptly stops. “Who’s out there?” calls a husky, nearly musical voice. Anna imagines it coated in red lipstick, or sleek velvet. 

Harry replies, strained: “It’s your father, Janis.”

Muffled: “Shit.”

Harry groans. “Don’t repeat that,” he says to Anna. She nods, wide-eyed. 

“Can you give me a minute, daddy?"

The sound of a window slamming shut. The record resumes. Harry takes a deep breath and runs his hand through his hair. Anna bites her lip. The music harkens back to her father’s favorite soap opera, with the two-timing nurses and the seductive doctor, each cast member charming each bed-bound matron and tightened, plasticized face. Even when armed with scalpel and syringe, the leading doctor sent each patron into fits of furious blushing, rendered somewhat paler beneath the fluorescent lights.

The door swings open; within the doorframe leans an hourglass woman, arms draped over the edges of the doorway. Her eyes gleam redder than her lips, burning bright from within their yellow-tinged whites and her gray eyeshadow, clouding her eyelids into smokescreens. “Champagne, anyone?” she asks, laughing boldly. She eyes Anna’s pillowcase. “Oh, daddy, you haven’t been off looting again, have you?”

Harry avoids her eyes.

“Don’t you know you can buy whatever you need at the mall?” Janis hums a tune, then continues. “We have the money to afford it, of course. You’ve got no need to go rummaging around the apartments of strangers-that’s far beneath you, daddy. You’re a respectable businessman, not a raccoon digging in a trashcan. Don’t make me feel ashamed of you.”

Harry gulps. “May we come inside?”

Janis wrinkles her nose. “The two of you smell like a morgue.” She points a black-pointed nail at Anna. “And who’s this? Have you found a replacement daughter?”

“She was dying, Janis.”

“So? We’re all dying all the time.”

“May we come in?”

“I’ve got some errands to run.”

Harry runs his hand through his hair again. He grits his teeth. “We came all this way to see you.”

Janis turns on her heel and reenters her apartment, dragging a long nail across the faded red wallpaper. She glances up at the ceiling and smiles at the strands of Christmas lights strung up haphazardly across it. She turns the corner-the sound of liquid splashing into a glass, heard only faintly beneath the phonograph. Janis returns, a large black purse slung over her shoulder, a wine glass dangling from her left hand. She takes a gulp before speaking. “Isn’t Hoenn grand, daddy? I’m going to get married soon, under these gorgeous neon lights! Promise me you’ll throw a banquet, daddy? We’ll invite the Stones, and the Drakes, he lovely Pleasants, and all of the rest of Hoenn-all of them except for the scrubbers. That party will be the only thing I’ll ever need, ever need ever again! Oh, we’ll have champagne for miles!”

“What are scrubbers?” asks Anna.

“Unclaimed bastards, people born with toilet brushes in one hand and a whiskey in the other, the lowliest, the unknown, those dirty-faced children,” replies Janis, almost singing. “People just like you.”

“She’s only a child, Janis,” growls Harry “And you’ve only just met her. Show some manners.”

“Children should know their place,” spits Janis. Her lip curls, revealing a mouth of small, impeccably maintained fangs. 

Harry sighs. “Who are you marrying today?”

“I’ll tell you on our walk,” says Janis, sliding out her apartment door and closing it loudly behind her. She sets off immediately; her black high heels echo through the hallway, skipping each half-step, like a smudged record of a song played by broken instruments. Harry follows, walking nearly on his tiptoes. He glances wildly from apartment door to apartment door. Behind him pads Anna, eyes following Harry’s path, ears hunting for the creak of wood, the crash of a broken plate. Janis glances behind her. “I’m not marrying my benefactor, if that’s what you’re thinking. His wife would kill him if he left her for a silly girl like me!”

Harry’s hands shake. His eyes fix to the carpet. Ahead, Janis pushes open the doors to another skywalk. Above them, gilded letters read, _Petalburg Botanical Gardens and Labs_. “What’s the child’s name?” asks Janis as the doors swing behind her; her voice’s temperature plummets. 

“Anna Marling,” says Anna. A bottle crashes from a countertop down the hall. She freezes.

“I thought you were done playing savior,” says Janis to Harry. He says nothing, only squints out the skywalk windows, shoves his shaking hands in his pockets. “I thought after mother died, you’d finally leave the street rats to their fate.”

Anna flexes her fingers, feels a burning in her chest. She stares furiously at Janis’s back, gleaming a ghostly white in the dim light. 

At the end of the hall, Janis stops. She jiggles the doorknob, then purses her lips. She turns around to face Harry and Anna. “It’s locked,” she announces.

Harry rubs his temples. From down the hall, a door clicks. He whips his head around. The fur on his face bristles. Anna jumps behind him and squeezes her eyes shut. Janis puts a hand on her hip. “It’s only Mrs. Bergman,” she says. “Don’t be a fool.”

Another door, this time closer to the skywalk, creaks open. 

“I have a bobby pin inside my purse,” says Janis, pulling open her purse and fishing around its bottom. “Remember how I used to use them to unlock mother’s music box? Oh, she used to throw a fit over that! Eventually I grew tired of it-both the tampering and her temper, and tossed the music box off her balcony”-she sighs dreamily-”but it’s no matter. The tune was rubbish anyway. Only a cripple could dance to that noise.”

She pulls a pin from beneath her comb and jiggles it in the lock. From down the hall, the sound of rushing feathers, a strangled cough. Harry hardly dares to breathe. “Have you finished the lock?” he whispers to Janis, pausing deeply between each word. 

“She just wants to lecture me on my dress again. I’ve told her over and over, ‘I’m not interested in your opinion, Mrs. Bergman, and frankly, I think my breasts look smashing,’ but she always runs after me, repeating her garbage over and over!” hisses Janis. Her hand tightens on the stem of her wine glass, still clutched in her left hand. “I’m almost done, daddy. Can we leave the girl behind, though? She’s so quiet, and frankly, she’s dull.”

Anna’s lip wobbles. Harry’s mouth forms a thin line. “No. Open the door, Janis.”

The lock clicks open, and Harry rushes forward, throwing open the doors and grabbing both Anna and Janis by their wrists, then slamming the door shut behind them. He looks around this unfamiliar lobby frantically-snatches of blue tile, thick, sweating air, an abundance of potted ferns, hanging plants, overgrown vines overcoming the wood-panelled walls, a reception desk, a security camera, a waiting bench, a pile of Hoenn’s finest tabloids-a waiting bench? With a great heave of his back, he shoves the bench against the doors. From the reception desk, a thin, metallic voice speaks: “Theft is punishable by death. Please do not remove the benches.”

“What’s that?” whispers Anna.

“We call it Scott,” says Harry. “He’s just a programmed voice. He has prerecorded reactions to your actions, just like an automated phone call.”

“Is she some sort of degenerate?” asks Janis, curling her lip.

“She’s from the surface,” snaps Harry. He sighs, then takes a deep breath. “The Littleroot and Oldale Complexes are the only bits of Hoenn she’s seen.”

“But she knows Own.” Janis cackles suddenly, dropping the wine glass to the floor. She barely blinks as its glass sprays across the tile. She begins to hum. “In Hoenn, Own’s all you need, you’ve got you and I’ve got me…”

Anna steps closer to Harry. She shudders as Janis tosses her thick, black hair and flutters her thick, black lashes. “I’ve got errands to run,” says Janis, “but first, may we stop at the restroom?”

“You never ask for anything,” grunts Harry. Janis smirks, then steps off down the narrow hallway to their left. From the ceiling dangles a flashing restroom sign. Water pools beneath it, seeping from a broken pipe in the women’s restroom. Janis splashes through it, turns sharply into the bathroom. Harry and Anna lean against the wall outside. “I’m sorry about her,” says Harry. “She’s a bit, erm-how do I put this nicely? She’s not always here, I suppose, and she’s not always kind.”

“She doesn’t like me,” sighs Anna. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

From the bathroom, Janis’s musical voice, echoing off the tile walls: “You’re dying, kid. You don’t have the time to be choosy.”

A faint murmur. The clink of glass against glass.

“Don’t expect any answers,” whispers Harry to Anna. He leans his head against the wall, shuts his eyes.

“Now sit on the sink, hold out your arm-oh, aren’t you lucky, surrounded by this feast! You have enough food and drink to last you a millenium!”

“I can’t eat cockroaches, ma’am…” a thin, sickly voice replies.

“Ah, but that tenderloin, that tenderloin!” Janis’s voice echoes through the hall. Harry tenses. Anna turns to ask him something-she can’t remember just what, surely it will come to her as soon as she opens her mouth, but stops when she sees the furrow of his brow, his hands shaking inside his pockets. Janis continues. “Have a lovely afternoon, sir! I’ll see you at my wedding!” 

She sloshes from the bathroom, purse hanging half-open from her shoulder, hem of her dress soaked with the greenish water. She smiles coyly at Anna and Harry. In the pit of her belly, Anna feels a deep, unsettling lurch. “You should’ve seen their lighting fixtures!” says Janis. “Absolutely appalling.”

“How about we show Anna the botanical gardens, then take you home?” says Harry.

“A brilliant plan!” Janis claps her hands together and starts off briskly towards the elevator down the hall. She stretches her arms overhead; they’re peppered with odd, curved scars, some stretch for only an inch, some are able to circle her forearm twice. Harry looks away at the sight, but Anna’s eyes train themselves to the pink-brown lines. Janis’s arms fall back to her sides; Anna’s eyes remain fixated.

Harry calls the elevator. They wait awkwardly for a minute, then step inside its cage. Three walls of its metal cage shine a brilliant silver; one is a dull, browned red. Static surrounds them, screeching from the elevator’s speaker. Anna looks down at her hands, sees the flesh bubbling beneath her charred, burnt skin. She shivers. Janis presses her lips together. The elevator shudders and groans, and Anna lurches forward, cries out. Harry pulls her up by her wrist. 

A pleasant ring, like a clerk’s bell. The elevator doors creak open, and they enter into a humid waiting room, decorated with photographs of various flowers. In each corner of the ceiling, a security camera watches. “Please wait,” says Scott from the loudspeaker. Harry taps his foot. “Now enter,” says Scott, accompanied by a clicking from the glass doors ahead.

Janis enters first. Anna watches as her long, black hair lifts from her shoulders, tracing a troubled storm cloud in the air. “Wind!” Anna cries, rushing into the breeze, laughing wildly as her hair flutters around her cheeks. Behind them, Harry smiles.

“Wow,” says Anna as she looks up at the thirty foot greenhouse roof above, nearly hidden by the treetops. She runs down the concrete path, laughing, oohing and aahing at the massive ferns, flower fixtures, and palm trees. She crosses a bridge over a stream, and shouts hello to the turtles crawling over its rocks. “It’s almost as good as home,” she whispers. 

Harry trails after her. He examines the turtles after Anna has left for the nearby playground. Their mouths gape up at him, their tiny legs flail over the smooth stones. He bends over, narrowing his eyes, looking closer. Then, he spots the sparks flying from beneath their bellies. He straightens up, sighs.

Janis picks a flower from each plant she passes, weaves them into a wreath around her brow. Her red lips form a sad, loose smile.

At the playground, Anna rides an animatronic bull, whooping and whirling her arm around as though waving a lasso. The breeze pulls her hair from her face; pools of sweat form beneath her arms. From the slide’s upper cave, a young Chinese boy emerges. His chubby arms fly over his head, and he shouts as he flies down, hair flying above his head, his smile growing too large for his face. “My name’s Ernest!” he calls to Anna.

Anna jumps, then answers. “I’m Anna!” 

“My grandma told me she’d meet me here, but it’s been a week and I still haven’t seen her,” Ernest says cheerfully, hopping off the slide and approaching Anna. He sticks out his hand. “At least there’s plenty of fruit to eat around here! It’s nice to meet you, Anna.”

She holds out her hand, then, remembering her talons, rescinds it. “It’s, um, nice to meet you, Ernest,” she says, lowering her head.

“Hey, don’t be embarrassed!” he cocks his head to the side. “We’re all a little messed up around here.”

Anna smiles. “Um, thanks.”

“How old are you?” asks Ernest. “I’m twelve.”

“Eight,” replies Anna. 

“Cool! I really like this place. There’s lots of trees. Do you like this place?”

Anna opens her mouth to reply, but is cut off by the harrowing, thin wailing of sirens.


	5. A Child in Trouble; The Saxophone Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _it's a long way down to the bottom of the river_

“Anna, Anna, Anna!” Harry’s cry echoes off the walls. Janis stumbles from a path on the playground’s left, eyes wild, ankles shaking in her stilettos. Anna stands, stunned. Ernest grabs her wrist, attempts to pull her into the ferns. Harry emerges from the right of the slide; his shoulders hunch forward, his frightened brown eyes catch Anna’s. Overhead, the palm trees sway in the breeze, and the sirens wail on, and on, and on.

Ernest yanks Anna into the ferns. In moments, Harry has knelt beside them, and Janis drops down shortly after. The great green leaves tickle Anna’s nose. They smell slightly acidic, and she purses her lips. “What lovely fanfare,” murmurs Janis, and Anna glances at her, eyes widening. Harry shakes his head.

“She’s gotten worse since I last saw her,” he whispers to Anna. His chest rises in a stutter, and falls in a sigh. “She’s in a mood, that’s all. One of her many, many moods. But enough on her. Right now we must focus on escape.”

Ernest hushes them. “Do you hear that?” he whispers.

Beneath the sirens rise a choir of alien voices, growling thick and guttural, chanting mangled syllables from an ancient language. A vile, gravelly harmony grinds beneath. Their chant echoes throughout the garden, pulsating the very air around Anna’s ears, driving Ernest to throw his hands over his ears, Janis’s lip to wobble. _Latin, maybe_ , thinks Harry, _or perhaps the language of a god long dead_. Only one human word, its meaning still unknown, emerges from their deep, violent chants: _KYOGRE_. 

The chants have overtaken the sirens now, morphed them into a tiny, high-pitched thimble of a drum beat, pulsing weakly beneath the steady roar of indecipherable shouts. The fans have shut off, and above the palm trees’ leaves droop, hang heavy and still. Anna’s breath dances against the fern; she flexes her fingers, fears her claws sinking into flesh, or worse, her own coffin. Beside her, Ernest squints, attempting to see through the green. Another drumming has started, deep banging timpanis rise as the siren fades, and the great cacophony echoes endlessly through the walls, overlapping itself, drowning out even the most basic of thoughts, making even the trees shudder in their endless sleep. It crescendos still; the glass pulses and cracks, above, a lightbulb sparks and shatters. Harry throws his hands over his head, and Anna copies him. Her head and ears pound. Janis has bit through her lip, and blood dribbles down her chin. In her yellow-red eyes, a flicker of clarity-fear. Ernest trembles in the great shaking noise. His small, bluish hands grasp the fern’s stem tightly. The chanting is nearly deafening now, in this beautiful garden-where the hydrangeas and palms droop in the dead air, and the voices of angry men create ribcages across the glass dome.

Suddenly, silence.

Anna clamps a hand over her mouth. Ernest’s knuckles shine white. Harry’s shoulders tense. Janis licks the blood from her lips. From within the deep pits of the deafening silence trickles a whimper. 

“Someone’s in trouble,” whispers Ernest.

“They aren’t important,” replies Harry, his whisper harsh. “What’s important right now is our survival. These aren’t our affairs, and we’ll be much better off escaped and alive than captured by these madmen.”

“But someone’s in trouble. They might get hurt,” says Ernest. Anna flexes her claws, bites her lip.

“It’s not our problem,” hisses Harry.

Footsteps. A deep hush falls over the group. Ernest glances back at the rest-at Harry’s steely glare, at Anna’s frightened gaze, at the dried blood on Janis’s chin. He gulps, balls his fists, then bursts from the ferns.

“Wait!” cries Anna, stumbling after him. A muffled shriek-not hers, a stranger’s-screams through the garden. Ernest whirls around, and his body stretches sideways, growing thinner, more malleable. He falls forward, curls in on himself, then begins to roll towards her. Anna blinks, and suddenly she is enveloped in his blue t-shirt and pitching forwards, then rolling upwards rapidly and back again. “What are you doing?” she cries. “What even are you?”

“I’m just an owned up kid, same boat as you,” shouts Ernest. His tone is reassuring, but Anna begins to cry nonetheless. She thinks she hears him swear, but his shirt is spinning and her head has fallen to her ankles and bounced back to her neck at least twelve times now. She thinks she hears Harry shouting and the chant rising, growing frenzied, some members shouting out of step. Harry’s shouts have vanished beneath them, and where is Janis’s bloody chin? Anna wonders. She frowns. Where are her mother and father? 

_Sad, probably_ , she thinks, _and drinking the same sour milk_.

She begins to cry harder. Her stomach lurches as Ernest spins faster, faster. Outside, a faint popping arises from the ground. She thinks she hears Harry again, but once more he’s swallowed by the shouting, always the shouting. “We’ve just got to go a little faster, Anna,” says Ernest. “I know you can’t see it right now, but only a feet below the garden is a rooftop. We just need a little more speed before we can rescue this kid, avoid the crazies, break the glass and escape to the roof. My grandma won’t mind; she’s probably not coming anyway.”

“Where’s Harry?” whimpers Anna.

“He’ll catch up to us soon,” Ernest assures her. His body suddenly jolts; Anna’s head collides with his collarbone, and he breaks from his curl. Anna smashes into the grass. Her mouth fills with dirt. Her claws slash ugly trails through the green. Ernest bounces wildly down the path, limbs flailing, before crashing into a fern. As he and Anna struggle to their feet, the chanting suddenly, violently, stops.

Heavy footsteps ring through the silent garden.

They pause.

A great ugly crack.

A great ugly cry.

A voice, deep and echoing and massive, filling the room like a saxophone, dripping with righteousness: “An abomination! Look, friends, at the way his body has been consumed by this threaded cocoon! See how his teeth have merged with its threads, how they bubble with the toxicity of his mother’s hand! He is ruined, ruined! Look at the way his eyes have compounded, at those hideous lumps sprouting from his rib cage! And who has done this to this poor child who can no longer move, can no longer sing? Who has so utterly destroyed him?

It is us, my friends. We are his destroyers, and we, as a society, have birthed him, raised him in our schools, our streethouses, our televisions, and it is we who have injected him with this poison-our Own! His mother may have been the one to administer the shot, but with our neon signs and our children-who we destroyed, we all destroyed- we encouraged her! And now we must right what we have wronged. We must provide mercy to this child and to this hopeless city...”

Ernest turns to Anna, face pale. From across the garden, a sudden yelp. A mass shuffling of feet circles them, broken only by the rustling of leaf against limb. From their right emerges Harry, panting, with fresh grass stains on his pants. “Goddamn it, Anna!” he hisses. “They’ll kill us-all of us, not just the grownups, and I’ve just stained my last good pair of pants trying to catch up to this child that you’ve run off with, and now we’re surrounded by these raving lunatics because your friend here had to tamper in petty heroics.”

From behind, fierce and musical: “Good _God_ , daddy, these men are atrocious! They’re all mad, all of them!” 

Between the leaves and branches, Anna spots a flicker of gray. Footsteps from behind, ahead, either side, but yet no faces, no hints of breath. She steps closer to Harry, the sound of her boot against pavement like the welding crash of steel against steel. He sighs. From the trees, faceless whispers-only the occasional gray flashes between the green. Janis groans, tugs at her hair. Ernest whips his head around, lips set in a grimace. “I’m going to get us out of here,” he whispers to Anna. “We can talk to them, convince them to let us and the crier go!” 

“Oh yeah?” barks Janis. She throws her hands over her mouth; hot tears spill down her cheeks. Harry reaches for her shoulder, but she bats his hand away. “First to go were the chandeliers, but we’re not here,” she mutters to herself, “not really.”

The whispers hush. Harry whips his head around wildly, spreads his arms, a flimsy shield, across the group. From the garden’s center-the fountain, Anna remembers-booms the saxophone voice, “Have we got visitors, friends? Ah, yes, four! Tell me, visitors, what is your condition?”

The four glance between themselves, searching for a designated speaker. After a long pause, Harry clears his throat. Shakily: “We are doing well. And yourself?”

A deep, throaty laugh. “We have discovered a liar, my friends! Tell me, you shadow of a man, did you cry when you injected your daughter with that poison?” 

Harry’s eyes widen. He opens his mouth, but the words flubber on his tongue, stumbling and tripping and falling into an unintelligible moan. 

Janis answers for him. “My daddy never cries!” she shouts, her voice echoing, like a song, through the garden. To Harry, she hisses, “Not even when mother died.” 

“This poor woman has lost her mind,” shouts the voice. “Look at her frightened eyes, the welts on the backs of her arms! She is a walking artifact, living in the history of our city’s former glory and her father’s crime! And her companions, too-children soiled by their parents’ dreams, by our city’s lofty ideals! My friends, we must take pity on those lost in Hoenn’s halls, for we, we are all one and the same, set apart only by our own mercy, and their pathetic madness.”

Janis’s knees knock together, but she stands tall. Beside her, Ernest’s body begins to stretch. Janis balls her hands into fists. She spits as she cries out. “I’m not crazy; this world is beautiful-can’t you see it? We’re all lovely, us gods and goddesses of our great city! We’re all woven from the same lovely fabric, we’re all Aphrodites on our Mount Olympus, we’re all Aphrodites!”-she chokes on a sob-”and I’m getting married this month, I really am, and he’ll even vouch for me, I swear, and he’ll marry me, he promised, he really promised...” 

“These creatures require mercy, the greatest tenderness!” booms the Saxophone Man. “As does this cocooned child before me, and the clawed child before you! Please, treat them kindly. Be gentle friends, for they are us, and we are we.”

Ernest leaps forward, curling himself into his ball, then careening sharply to the left. “Follow me!” he shouts as water begins to pool on the ground. “I don’t think this guy wants to listen to us!”

Steam balloons from Anna’s heels as she stumbles after him. Her feet ache. Janis rushes ahead, trailing close behind Ernest, her black hair streaming behind her like a thick cloud of smoke. Anna trips over a vine, sneakily snaking its way across the path, and is scooped up by Harry. He grips her tightly; she glances up and sees his jaw set in a firm, powerful line, but his eyes nervous, constantly flicking from Ernest’s back to the gray faced men stalking behind them, their arms extended, their eyes the same dead red as Janis’s. 

“Where are we going?” grunts Harry to Ernest. “The glass is behind us!” 

Through her bobbing vision, Anna sees the fountain ahead, glorious and golden, and at its feet stands a bearded muscular man, dressed all in black but for a blue bandana circling his head. His eyes shine a deep red. In front of him lays a purplish, oozing cocoon. Outlined in its profile is a sharp nose and thick, pink lips. It shakes slightly as Ernest whirls towards it, and convulses violently as the Saxophone Man raises one gloved hand, bares his fanged teeth. Ernest shudders but continues to roll and roll, pebbles spraying in his wake. He thunders towards the fountain as the gray men close in. Harry’s nails dig into Anna’s side; she whimpers. “Of all the places to die,” mutters Harry, “and to think that I thought Janis would be in a good mood today, of all days…A walk, God, what was I thinking? I’m sorry, Anna, that you ended up here, and with me, of all people. I truly am, and I hope this isn’t goodbye.”

Ernest snatches the flopping thing from the pavement and envelops it within himself; he whips around, shouting, “Let’s go!”

The Saxophone Man flicks his fingers, and the grey men part. His red eyes shine like steel. A smirk crosses his face. “How the children hate mercy!” he booms as they scramble for the glass, as Janis stumbles in her stilettos. “What pathetic masochists they must be, to flee so desperately from their saviors! Look how they run, like lemmings over a cliff!”

Ferns slap Anna’s face, scrape her arms, slash her cheeks. Harry has raised his other arm over his face. He bites his tongue as he stumbles over a rock. “We’re almost to the glass!” shouts Ernest. 

“Put your hands over your face, Anna,” warns Harry. 

The glass shatters and dances a pirouette through the dead air. Ernest disappears through the gaping hole, dropping down, down, down, and Anna screams, throws her hands over her face. Oh, how many floors they’ve travelled up in those shuddering elevators! And how far down is that rooftop, and outside is the smog, and the beast, that hideous beast!

“Are you ready, Anna?” asks Harry. She squeezes her eyes shut. He nods.

“Ready. Set. Jump!”


	6. Rooftop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _And what matters ain't the "who's baddest" but  
>  The ones who stop you fallin' from your ladder, baby_

They’re falling and falling and falling through the thick dead air; Anna counts the bricks as they pass before her-ten, twelve, sixteen.. Harry’s arm squeezes her waist tight, cuts off her thoughts. Below, the concrete floor, to their right, ten feet down, a grey rooftop. Directly below falls Ernest, still curled around the cocoon, and above flails Janis. The air rushes in Anna’s ears. Neon lights blink from the cracks between buildings, glinting greens and pinks off Anna’s extended talons, reaching for the ceiling. Harry’s breathing has quickened to nearly unhealthy rates. His face reddens. He’s always feared an afterlife, whether that be the dull glow of Heaven or the burnt coals of Hell or even the murky waters of the River Styx. He’s always wondered whether they breath down there, and if their hearts will beat while they beat him. 

Janis is screaming now. She clutches her bag to her chest as her hair waves a banner over her head.   
For a moment, Harry hates her. 

There’s a slight breeze. _Have the garden’s fans followed us down_? thinks Anna. They drift right. From below, they hear the smack of flesh against stone. A surge of wind fills their ears-it almost feels natural, earthy to Anna, and she smiles. The rooftop is nearly directly, impossibly below them. On it lays Ernest, sprawled face-up over the hideous cocoon. He catches Anna’s eye, then smiles. A bloody gap glares from where his front tooth used to be. Anna smiles weakly back. 

Harry stumbles as his feet hit the rooftop; he lurches forward, his breathing abnormally fast, still gripping tightly to Anna, then steadies himself on a small shed-like structure. Anna’s stomach aches. “Can you put me down?” she asks as Janis falls behind them, swearing profusely to herself. 

“Oh, um,” wheezes Harry. He sets Anna down, and after a brief moment of hesitation, awkwardly pats her head. He coughs, then leans his head against the wall. “If you’d, um, excuse me for a minute.”

Anna nods, and turns to face the city. On the rooftop, the once distant neon signs now surround her, gleaming with falsified grins and crackling lettering. Great tapestry advertisements hang from the sides of ceiling scrapers, decorated with the calculated, serene smiles of the nuclear family, painted chandeliers, syringes filled with promise. Anna can barely read their faded words. She can only discern the scorched, black circles dotting its bottom, and from above, she hears the flap flapping of wings. Her eyes widen. Flashes of gaping black eyes, gnashing fangs, the elongated neck, glass breaking, the claws, the claws, the claws-! 

Anna scrambles backwards, feels the shadow fall over her face; she’s too afraid to look up for fear of those hideous eyes. “Harry!” she squeaks as her knees knock together. “Harry, it’s here!” 

“Have you taught the child any manners?” calls Janis to Harry.

From the background, Ernest to the cocoon: “We made it! We actually made it!”

Harry glances up. “You’re okay, Anna. That’s no beast.” He squints. “It’s a teenage girl, if I’m not mistaken.”

Wind rushes through Anna’s hair. She blinks, air pulling at her eyelids. The flapping slows, and at the roof’s edge, the girl lands.

Anna notices her wings first; they’re almost queenly and shine a smooth, royal navy. From her wingtips protrude two shrivelled, brown fingers. Her fingernails extend nearly an inch past her fingertip, and, like Anna’s, curl slightly at the tip. They twitch every so often as she stands silent before the five. Her brown eyes, surveying the scene beneath heavy lids, reveal nothing. As her gaze meets Harry’s wrinkled forehead, her lip curls. 

Ernest steps forward. He extends a hand. She blinks. “Hi!” he says, a lisp emerging from his gapped teeth. 

She says nothing.

“I’m Ernest.”

She rubs her lips together before responding. “I’m... Wisteria. I’m, um, I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Me too!” quips Ernest. “Now that I think about it, though, jumping out the window wasn’t a good idea in the first place.”

“No,” sighs Harry, “it wasn’t.” 

“I see you’re traveling with adults,” says Wisteria; her voice quavers slightly, and her eyes swerve between Harry and Janis.

“So what?” says Janis. “We’re responsible adults--right, daddy?”

“Listen, little boy,” says Wisteria to Ernest. She waves a wing at Anna, too, gesturing for her to come closer. Hesitantly, Anna steps forward. Her heart still pounds fiercely. “What do you know about those two?”

Ernest shrugs. “The lady’s a little bit crazy, and the old man would’ve let that thing”--he points at the cocoon--” _die_ if I hadn’t saved it!”

“He was scared,” says Anna, voice low. She stares past Wisteria’s feathered shoulder, watching the spaces between buildings. Every few moments, she shudders at the imagined sound of leathery wings flapping against dulled air. “Those men were being cruel, I think. He thought we were going to die.”

“You two listen here,” whispers Wisteria. “People like them and my mother and yours fucked over our city. They fucked over us. You can’t trust people like that-you know who I’m talking about, the ones who shot their kids up and watched them burn. Our moms and dads, all those old bastards-they screwed us all over. I bet it was them who sent you guys flying out that window, huh. And if it wasn’t those two over there, it was some other ones. You just..you can’t trust people like that. We’ve all been screwed over by them; that’s why I helped you, you know. I saw you all falling, and I knew you kids didn’t deserve to die, so I, I stepped in.” 

“You’re a good person,” says Ernest. He smiles crookedly; bluish hues shimmer beneath his skin. “We could use another one around here.”

“Harry’s a good person, and Janis is too, sometimes,” says Anna, distracted. Her eyes still search for the beast. 

“Little girl, I can assure you that you don’t know the first thing about them, not really. That’s the thing about adults, they’re all full of nasty secrets. Kids’ll just tell you, but adults, they’ll hoard their rottenness to the grave.”

“Are you finished?” calls Janis from the roof’s edge. She dangles her legs over it and clutches her bag to her side. With her free hand, she fumbles in it for a carton of cigarettes. Within seconds, a cigarette protrudes from her red lips. She lights it. “I can’t afford to miss my wedding.”

“Yeah,” says Ernest, “we should get looking for my grandma.” Beneath his eyes, clouds form. He glances sideways at Wisteria. “You seem like a trustworthy person. Do you want to come with us?”

“Excuse me, but I think our little caravan is plenty big enough,” says Harry, still panting. “We’re already bound to attract attention with four and a half people. If we add another, we’ll likely have those madmen and half of Hoenn trying to kill us. Besides, we aren’t a traveling circus. We are simply in the process of returning home, not housing and providing for vagrant children.”

“You should come with us,” says Ernest to Wisteria.

“Hurry up!” growls Janis as she crawls to her feet. “I forgot my dress at home, and my fiancée won’t appreciate me showing up in funeral garb.”

Ernest clasps his hands together. “Please come with us.”

“What do you think, little girl?” says Wisteria to Anna.

“You seem lonely,” says Anna.

Wisteria’s shriveled fingers twitch. “What makes you say that?”

“Lonely people talk a lot.”

Wisteria cracks a smile. “You might be right about that one, little girl.”

Ernest grins in relief. “We should head to the floor through this building,” says Harry from behind. “If I remember correctly, this is Rustboro Elementary… I’ve never been inside, but my, my wife used to drop Janis off each morning. It had the best reputation, we’d been told-the greatest science program, specifically. You used to love science class, didn’t you, Janis?”

“With Ms. Lately? Oh, I adored her! She always had the most beautiful buttons, and I always envied her collared shirts.”

“My grandma homeschooled me,” says Ernest.

“Of course she did. All the rats learn at home,” says Janis, rolling her eyes. “Mother homeschooled me after the fourth grade, but that’s because Daddy lost his job and wasted his last dollars on some low-class Own. But I’m no street rat. I crawled out of that home and into the finest of Hoenn society all on my own. My Own!”-she laughs suddenly, jabs a bobby pin in the rooftop shed’s lock and jiggles it until she hears it click, then, softly, sings to herself-”In Hoenn, Own’s all you need, you’ve got you and I’ve got me…”

They file into the shed behind Janis, then down a stairway in its left corner. Harry follows first, hands shoved deep in his pockets and a deep wrinkle settling on his forehead. Next comes Ernest, lugging the cocoon over his shoulder. Wisteria steps in after; she folds her wings close to her body, glances quickly between the impending darkness and the dim light outside. Finally is Anna. She stands still for a moment, watching the great dead city stand in its hollow glory, its neon signs crying for a time long past. Through the bars of buildings she spots the center pillar, smooth and white and pure, spots the terrible beast perched on its side, its jaws gaping, its black pits of eyes empty, almost sad. 

Anna shudders and shuts the door behind her.


	7. Interlude: Classroom Aphrodite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I quit my dreaming the moment that I found you  
>  I started dancing just to be around you_

“Hey, Anna, are you up?”

Anna moans, blinks twice. The classroom ceiling shifts into focus; its tiles edges sharpen, and its plaster cracks into spiderwebs over her school desk canopy. Hoenn’s pale eternal light, peeking from the slats between window blinds, forms bars across the bodies sleeping around her, sneaking beneath desks and over bookshelves. Wilted flowers droop from a vase on the teacher’s desk. Their scent has faded years ago. 

Anna crawls from beneath her desk. Her talons scritch scratch across the wood floor. She winces as the city’s light crosses her vision, turns the dark room into a painful squint. She ducks, yawns, glances around the room.

“Anna, over here.” Anna spies Janis’s red irises, gleaming like burnt coals beneath the window. As her eyes adjust, she makes out Janis laying on her side, clutching a physics textbook to her chest. Her nails dig into its cover. “Daddy’s on your other side. Don’t step on him-he always hated when I used to crawl into he and mother’s bed, back when I was a little girl. I never meant to, but I always woke him up.”

Anna bites her lip. She misses her mother’s bed and its quilt, so often draped over the backboard. 

“Are you coming over here or what?” hisses Janis. 

“Sorry, I-I was just thinking,” whispers Anna. She hesitates briefly before rising. _She’s not angry at me, is she_? she wonders before stepping gingerly over Harry. He groans slightly as she passes, pulls a hand over his furrowed brow. Anna sighs, then raises her arms as she shimmies between desks. The left lays slightly open; a notebook protrudes from within. Anna stares at it for a moment, rolls snatching it up back and forth in her mind. But she’s always been the worst reader in her class, and only weeks from her surface schoolhouse, letters are fast fading into symbols, an impossible gibberish. 

Anna sits cross-legged beside Janis. For a few moments, she shuffles her legs and rearranges her dress, searching for comfort on the hardwood floor. Janis watches in silence until Anna settles. For nearly a minute, neither of them speaks. Then: “You know, Anna, you’re not as hopeless as I thought. I was certain you were going to perish in the botanical gardens.”

“Um, thanks,” replies Anna. 

“I’ve got something for you”-Anna looks up, eyes brightening-”I’ll even give it to you for free. Imagine that-me, giving to a charity case, when I’d usually charge a small fortune! But you’ll have to wait for it, Anna. It’s a very special gift.”

“My birthday will be soon,” says Anna, hoping for cake, a delicious carrot cake! Her grandmother’s had always been lovely, and how she misses sweets! She licks her lips, and tries not to beg. “If you want, you could give it to me then.”

“We’ll see.” Janis sits up, leans against the wall. She places the textbook in her lap, and, absentmindedly, picks at its cover’s laminate. “Now that you’re friends with daddy, I guess I’ll have to invite you to my wedding.”

Anna yawns. “Will there be cake?”

“ _Will there be cake_? Don’t make me laugh, Anna. There will be an entire feast! We’ll have grand silk curtains falling from the floor to the ceiling, a dozen waiters, an entire orchestra! It’ll be held at the pillar’s ballroom, and I’ll dance and be served the finest champagne! Oh, how the floor will sparkle beneath my feet! It’ll be as if...as if it were held on Mount Olympus. I’ll invite all the Gods, all of the Goddesses. My fianceé is a powerful man--if he wished, he could command the Gods from their thrones, have them kneel at his feet, ask them to place guns to their temples. Oh, Anna, I’ve made a pun! Wasn’t it funny?”

Anna bites her lip. “Your wedding sounds lovely.”

“You’ll read about it in your history book, if they still write history books. I bet I’d make it in one. I used to sing and dance--my daddy told you that much, right? I danced at the Mauville Main over on Slate Street, where high society mingled and clashed with the strobe lights, or occasionally beggars. But the Mauville Main, well, it was full of glittering ceilings, glittering people. I was Mr. Stone’s favorite. He always tipped me in hundred dollar bills. They were so crisp-oh, how I love the smell of luxury. It surrounds you as soon as you inhale, and when you live in it… I only slept with Mr. Stone once. The old man Stone, I mean”-she pauses, takes a deep, shaky breath--”am I making sense? I’m silly sometimes, even when I’m wide awake.”

Anna nods. She suddenly feels her age, a mere eight years old, swimming in the vast, shark-filled waters of twenty-two. Her eyelids flutter. Children, she recalls her mother saying, require ten hours of sleep to function properly.

“I’m not marrying the old man, though. A lady’s got to have some standards, doesn’t she?” Janis laughs harshly, then throws her hands over her mouth. Beneath a desk, Wisteria stirs, ruffles her feathers. Quieter, Janis continues. “I met my fianceé at the ballroom’s edge. I was wearing a little white mask, I remember--it had little gold detailing at the top. It had been my mother’s; daddy was furious when I stole it! I snuck in and whisked it away, then I lost it at the ball. It must’ve fallen in the fountain. I’d like to see that fountain again. It’s so strange. I feel so awake right now. It’s like someone’s lifted a veil over my face, and suddenly... I feel so, so sad. Has daddy ever told you about my mother?”

“I think I saw her in a picture,” murmurs Anna, groggily.

“Nevermind her. She’s not important. She’s a nobody now, a dead nobody, a nobody to anybody who’s anybody”--she pauses, suddenly contemplative; after a moment, her words avalanche, like rotten milk, from her lips-”I don’t think Daddy’s ever forgiven me, but he lives in a dump, and he hates me, he hates me, he hates me! You can see it in his eyes, when they flash just a bit. He hates me, and I bet you do, too. But you won’t, you’ll see, you’ll love me like an audience-your gift, Anna, your gift, oh, you’ll love me like those people at the pictures. They used to throw roses at me; my presence was a gift wrapped in gold, silver, crystal! Aphrodite…Aphrodite... Anna, have you ever looked upon our grand city and seen, truly seen, its greatness, and the greatness it can give back to you? How the stars have burnt through the ground to shine on us?”

Janis waits, motionless, for Anna’s response. The pale bars of light cross her eyes. Squinting, she glances at Anna, but the girl has fallen asleep. Janis sighs, rests her head on the textbook. Her nails have dug gashes across its molecular cover. 

“I hate this town,” she mutters.


	8. The Students of Rustboro Elementary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Expect you think that I should be haunted  
>  But it never really bothers me_

_Anna_.

 _Anna Banana_.

 _Anna Pajama_.

No, that’s not right.

 _Anna Savannah_.

That’s her cousin’s name.

 _Anna Tropicana_.

Anna squints at the ceiling. On it crawls a feeler--or so her mother called them. The encyclopedia called it a house centipede, but mother said that was too refined, like store-bought sugar. Anna’s child memory can barely conjure her face, her weathered forehead softened through a fogged up window, her thin lips a mirage, perhaps. Only her voice rings clear. Its sugar honey drips from the clogged cogs of memory to Anna’s pale cheeks. 

What had her mother called her again?

 _Anna Montana_.

 _Anna Cabana_.

It must have been pajama. Yes, just like the ones with the footies! Anna remembers now. Her grandma Jo had made them special, just like her mother’s quilt. She’d said it was a generational tradition-or something like that, and someday Anna would sew something special for her own children-a hat or a rucksack, perhaps. But Anna’s stomach had churned at the thought of her own children. Firstly, she’d known a high school girl who’d been expecting, and some poke had thrown eggs at her screen porch, and another had drawn pictures of her on the chalkboard, all bloated and whale-like. Secondly, Anna didn’t much like other children. Other children, she knew, patrolled the edges of their remote property; their bully guard-dog eyes squinted through the schoolyard fence, shadowed. Sometimes, they mocked her stammer, the long pauses she took while reading words from the page. Othertimes, they scratched cruel notes on their slates in class-sometimes about Betty, maybe June. Sometimes Anna, when she’d slipped up and said something particularly dumb. 

Anna Pajama.

Her father had always thought the name silly, but how her mother adored it! “You’ll be special someday,” her mother would tell her, often as she stirred a bowl of apple slices and sugars. “I bet we’ll read about you in a history book, Anna Pajama. Maybe you’ll be quilter of the year!”

Anna smiles. Above, the feeler dances along a crack in the tiled ceiling. She tries to count its legs, but their controlled frenzy moves too quickly. Besides, she can’t see well in the dark.

Across the room, Harry stirs. He rises slowly, stretches his arms over his head and his mouth into a hippo’s gaping yawn. He runs a hand through his hair, then drags his fingers across the permanent moons beneath his eyes. “Good morning, Anna,” he says, yawn still strung through his words.

“Good morning, Harry,” whispers Anna. 

“I’m famished.” Harry stands, wipes his hands on his trousers. “During the night, I scoped these desks, but I suppose no one forgot their lunch box on the last day of school.” 

“I used to forget my lunch box on Wednesdays,” says Anna. “The other kids said it was because I was the bottom of my class.”

“Yes, well, I suppose there was a reason for that, wasn’t there?” Harry beckons her with a hand. “We’ll find breakfast for the others on this floor or the one below, I’d imagine. Would you like to join me?”

Anna glances down at Janis, her black hair a waterfall over her textbook’s edge, then nods.

++

Like loosely anchored tumbleweeds, fallen posters litter the halls of Rustboro Elementary. They peel over themselves, spread a paper carpet across the wooden floors. Harry steps gingerly between their edges, and motions for Anna to do the same. As she attempts to keep pace with Harry’s large bounds, she tries to read the upward facing ones, but struggles with their larger words. In Harry’s haste, she gives up.

“Why are you walking so fast?” she whispers, feeling small and watched in the empty hall.

“Excuse me, please. I’m awful at being hungry. I require immediate sustenance if I’m to be of any good conversation. I’m sure Darwin wrote about that, in his famous book-ah, I can’t remember the name right now.” Harry veers suddenly to the left, jiggles a doorknob. He pauses, furrows his brow, then opens it. 

From the windows, an advertisement’s soft red glow enters the room, paints its chemistry sets and high stools its own silent red. Harry pads to the teacher’s desk. He leafs through the papers laid upon it. “This poor boy,” he says, “what’s the name-ah, yes, Wally, Wally Glen. He’s failed each test horribly. Have a look, Anna. The teacher’s even compiled a portfolio of his soppy work. I certainly hope you did better than he did.”

Anna takes the papers from his hands, and as he begins shuffling through the drawers, she skims them. Her marks were barely better. She bites her lip. 

Anna glances back at Harry. He’s pulled out a folder from the third drawer. It’s coated in dust. His forehead wrinkles deepen with each of its pages he turns. Anna steps closer and peers over his shoulder. 

Its words are written in a sprawling cursive scrawl with no regards to margins or legibility. Occasionally, it crosses the illustrations, sketched haphazardly across the page, their contents drawn in meticulous ballpoint pen. Their thin, calculated lines seem to compensate for the writing’s labyrinth. Anna searches for a story in those lines. She finds a heartbreak in the barrel of a syringe, a question in its shading. Ambition, perhaps, screams from the labelling, written plainly beside each working part of the device. Innovation or desperation, reasons Anna, explains the frantic writing. A syringe, she thinks, turning over the word in her mind. She thinks of the lumbering, beady eyed boy, whose existence she now cannot place in reality or mirage, whose glowing syringe brought her these claws, these claws who she now sees drawn on this next page. They’ve been sketched so accurately-the arc of her claw rising and falling like a replicated sunset, the crinkled burns sprawling across her hand. Even the small fingers emulate her own. 

“It’s not a picture of you, Anna, in case you were wondering,” says Harry, his eyes still trained to the page. “No Own is unique, no matter what the advertisements say”-he nearly chuckles to himself-”no Own is your own.”

“Whose hands are those?” asks Anna. Her voice shivers.

“A girl from this very chemistry class, or so it says here.” He reads from the page. “ _xxx Blackwood, age 11, female. Six days after administration. Has returned to school fairly quickly, recovery far swifter than imagined. Mother keeps complaining about the hideous claws, but father thankful for monetary compensation. Loves his new chandelier. Says it matches the drapes marvellously. Mother says it’s an awful fixture, but I remain partial to it. The girl, it seems, adores it as well. She remains cheerful about the universe, despite her new flaws. The claws, must eliminate the claws. Too pronounced, too risky for old money. She’d make a lovely model, if not for their accompanying burns, or the way the light glints off those claws in their traumatic way. She has such a winning smile. She could have been prom queen, but I suppose the future will do._ ”

“Classic,” says Harry. He shuts the file firmly, his mouth zipped into a thin line, scans the file’s front, then shoves it in the drawer. “Written by Roxanne Yarnly. If I’m not mistaken, she taught Janis, and perhaps her old friend, what’s-her-name. Nevermind that, it’s unnecessary. Anna, if you’d excuse me while I search the rest of these drawers, could you kindly check the desks for food?” 

Anna nods and sets off down the aisle. Her little brown boots munch on broken glass. She drags a claw along a passing desk’s edge, and winces at the resulting eerie, almost inhuman scrape. She glances down the desk, spots a backpack laying, zipper half open, on a stool. Pins dot its landscape, one pulling a concerned mother’s political plugs, another advertising a bottle of sarsaparilla. Anna approaches carefully. She flexes her fingers. She stretches her claws-too pronounced, too risky, she thinks. A prototype’s fatal flaw.

Using her thumb, she pushes the backpack’s flap open, then immediately throws her hand over her mouth. A foul smell floods the room, invades the cracks in its ceiling, the safety goggles strewn on the window seat. “We certainly have awful luck,” Harry says, wrinkling his nose as Anna coughs, loudly. 

From the floor below rises a great, rusting creak.

Then, like the rolling burst of a cannon row, begins the rumbling.

Bile rises in Anna’s throat as the odor floods her nostrils and the crash-crashing of downstairs books drown her ears. Her body sways back and forth. Harry reaches for her, but she pitches forward, forward, forward, and there are her claws, too pronounced, too risky, and the desk rapidly approaching--

“ _Do you value your life?_ ” asks the grotesque boy-creature, cocking its bulbous head to the side. Its cheeks lurch sideways. It blinks. “ _You’re not responding. I hope that doesn't mean no._ ”

Plaster flutters from the ceiling. To Anna, it resembles columns of sunlit dust, falling like snow from her farmhouse’s curtains. She’s always liked winter. How she’d love to go sledding right now!

“ _If you were truly your own, you’d rise like a bullfighter._ ”

Anna tries to twitch her fingers. They’re warm, oddly, and pink. Unclawed, unscathed.

“This is history,” she says.

“ _You’ve got a big imagination_ ,” says the thing.

“The floor’s shaking,” says Anna. She’s laying in a field, a ceilinged field, she realizes as her lips close.

The boy lurches to his feet. He throws his hands over his head; the sun catches between his stubby, webbed fingers. “ _The obvious, the obvious! You’re not your own-you are a product of your environment! You are the culmination of your mother, your father, these neon lights, all of your witnessed evils and goods! You, the child, are what the world makes of you. But whose, whose are you?_ ”

The boy-thing is fading fast into a rapidly bobbing tiled wall. His beady eyes turn left into a drinking fountain, peeling sign. “I’m Anna,” Anna replies, “and you're frightening me…”

“Shush, Anna,” hisses Harry. He’s stopped running now. The world stands still. Between blinks, Anna can see she’s been tucked under his arm. Her forehead’s blood dots his white shirt. “It’s coming up the stairs.”

“Who’s coming?” asks Anna. Her head throbs fiercely; blood dribbles down her chin. From just down the hall, she hears the ascending cracking of wood and shattering of glass.

From the classroom comes Wisteria’s grunt, then Janis’s shout: “Daddy, where are you? Something’s approaching, and it sounds like a rioting party!” 

“She’s gone absolutely mad,” mutters Harry. The rumbles rise up the stairs.

Blood dabbles down Anna’s nose. “I’m afraid I hit my head,” she says faintly. 

“Janis,” says Harry. His voice quavers beneath the crushing wood. It’s close now; the door shivers. “You must listen to me now, Janis. Once the door falls, you and the others are going to run down this hall in a zig-zag fashion, you understand? Don’t look behind you. Don’t say a word. And above all else, remain calm. Remember, above all else, remain calm.”

 _Above all else_ , thinks Anna as the door begins to crack and Janis begins teetering across the hall, _remain calm_.

Wisteria emerges from their classroom, feathers ruffled, heavy eyelids still weighed down by sleep. Cracks spider across the stairway door. Wisteria starts to run, passes Janis’s shoulder, catches scent of her perfume and gags. She shouts something to Anna, but it’s drowned out by a great, terrible smash.

All fall still. Their breath catches in their throats. Their hearts pound. Their feet freeze to the floor. 

Through her spotty vision, Anna can make out the thing. Its eyes twitch beneath crusted shut lids. Its nose juts from its face dramatically, abruptly, a violent cliff on a prairie kind. Its neck has sunk into its stony body, and its arms swirl round and round, seemingly freed from their joints, whirring, whirring. It rotates its stout body from side to side, leans sideways. Its head barely taps the water fountain, and it withdraws, confused. _A child_ , thinks Anna, _good god, was that thing a child_?

She opens her mouth, but Harry puts a finger to his lips. He gestures towards the thing-child’s, Anna reminds herself-sunken ears. Then he drags his finger across his throat.

It totters forward. The floor beneath it rumbles. Around it, fallen posters swirl. Wisteria’s knee rocks. She rubs her lips together. If only she could run, rush flying down the derelict hall, flap free of this silent cage!-but she stands still, waits for opportunity’s swoop. The thing, too, stands waiting, nose cocked like a trigger, arms still whirring, whirring.

 _Where is Ernest_? thinks Anna woozily. Her head feels very, very hot. In the classroom, a book thuds to the floor. The thing whips in its direction. 

Anna’s eyes widen; she snaps her head up. _**Where is Ernest**_?


	9. Dust Bowl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _everyone loves a man who lets the hardest people build him up and cut him down to lovable size_

Ernest had always liked the way the light reflects off their coffee table. It casted a stained-glass rainbow across their living room’s mottled brown walls, and a daily smile across his round face. Just inside the kitchen, his father swirled a wooden spoon around and around their massive cooking pot. The rich smell of dumplings wafted through their tiny apartment; Ernest followed it with his nose, sniffing once and then sniffing again, deeply, then letting his eyelids flutter shut. From their bathroom came his grandma’s snore, and he giggled. Ernest has always loved the little things. Everything, he likes to think, is a piece of art, if you just cock your head a little to the side and squint your eyes so tight that the whole world goes blurry and you don’t think about much of anything too hard. “You just have to look at it the right way,” he’d always told his grandma, whose vision went dark a long, long time ago.

She’d nod, frowning slightly with those thin lips of hers. Then she’d tug at the bottoms of her sleeves. “Ernest,” she’d finally say, “why don’t you paint Grandma a picture?”

“But grandma,” Ernest would reply, “there are pictures everywhere. Why would I need to paint my own?”

 _Dang_ , thinks Ernest as he tugs desperately at the cocoon’s feet, _this poor lil fella’s parents probably gave him a double dose of Own_. He could have sworn he’d propped the cocoon up against the blackboard last night, but overnight it had moved-teleported, probably, Ernest would bet a pocket of change and a gumball on it-and buried itself beneath the bookshelf. Its sludge burns against Ernest’s hands as he pulls-he nearly swears. He glances up, seeking anyone’s help, but finds himself alone. He listens for the rumbling, that horrible rumbling, but only a thin, manic, mechanical whirring whizzes through the hall. He likes to believe it’s the heating vent, laying warmth over the walls-a security blanket. Ernest smiles.

He tugs at the cocoon’s feet again. His hands burn. He grimaces.

It would be so easy just to leave it.

 _But_ , thinks Ernest, _I’m better than that_. The others have left them-except for Anna, maybe, but sometimes Ernest doubts her. She’s always twitching her claws, biting her lips, silent. _But she’s little _, he thinks, _and I’m big_. _And us big people just gotta work until the little ones get big, too_.__

__Still, he wishes she’d help him all the same._ _

__He gives the cocoon’s feet another pull. It gives a few inches. _Beneath all the sludge and silk_ , wonders Ernest, _does it wear shoes_? He pulls again. Another few inches. Another pull-the biggest yet. The cocoon slides out nearly a foot; its hip nudges the bookshelf, sending an encyclopedia, precariously perched at the bookshelf’s summit, plummeting. It hits the ground with a thick thud. Dust whirls from its pages. They dance a sunshower, visible only in the thin veins of neon light, wisping in loose, meandering circles, and wow, Ernest thinks they would look beautiful in--_ _

__The whirring has stopped._ _

__A thick, imposing silence falls over the room. Ernest begins to sweat. Something is watching him, he’s sure of it, because in that silence, that hanging silence, he hears the raspy, hoarse slurp of its breath._ _

__Not daring to glance behind him, Ernest gives the cocoon another tug. It slides along the side of the bookshelf’s bottom, knocking it with each passing rib. Books topple from the shelves and crash crash to the floor with a resounding, resolute thud. Ernest’s hands shake as they burn. Slowly, he turns, and his face pales. The thing wheezes. Dust shivers from its tongue. The whirring of its arms quickens, echoes off the walls like a dentist’s drill’s shrill cry. Its eyes attempt to burst from their crusted shut lids. Though it stands only four feet tall, its shadow stretches across the room, and beneath its shut lids, he feels it watching him. With each tremble of his hands, its eyes follow, and its arms whirl faster, faster. _God_ , thinks Ernest, _grandma never was afraid of the future-it was always the past, she said. The Russians_ , his thoughts race aimlessly as the creature leans forward and his legs lay numb beneath him, _she always said it’d be the Russians or the Japanese or even some old-minded Americans, because even if you’d lived in America since the railroads, the people who hated you still hated you-its eyelids tremble-and if they ever got the chance, they’d break your back, so watch your back, Ernest, watch it good_ \--_ _

__Seemingly guided by its compass nose, it lurches forward. Ernest yanks the cocoon from beneath the shelf, tosses it over his shoulder-funny, how much lighter it has become since the gardens, but he can’t dwell on that, oh no-then rolls to the side as the child-creature slams through the bookshelf, then into the wall. It struggles to pull its nose from its own imprint, twitches its eyelids as plaster dusts white freckles over its bloated, bluish cheeks. Ernest dashes for the door, but it has righted itself and sends itself whirl hurling towards the hall. He throws himself to the side, and nearly chokes on the sawdust spewing from the door’s fresh gaping wound. The cocoon rattles against his back. Something within it twitches. Sweat sticks Ernest’s shirt to his body. He shivers. Where is everyone? The creature toddles itself to balance, rumble-reverses. Spiderwebs coat its belly, he notices, and there’s one crawling over its cheek, eight limbs creeping along the plaster and over its nose… Ernest yelps, flails his hands over his face. The arms whirl even faster; its shoulders crack and crack, and Ernest feels a funny, horrible swirling in his stomach._ _

__Ernest lurches sideways, leans against the wall to support himself. The cocoon’s casing stings against his neck. His stomach churns. He throws a hand over his mouth. The creature lowers its head. Dust shoots from its nostrils. It toddles forward once, and its eyes start to bulge again and Ernest knows that this is the end, no Americans, no Russians, just him and a lost child, lost in the dust. The bile in his stomach rises. The creature’s nose nearly scrapes the floor; it takes a long, shuddering wheeze, then rumbles forwards him. Ernest squeezes his eyes shut, feels a warm liquid trickling down his leg, feels the bile rising, rising, and then, like a bottle of New Year’s champagne, he explodes._ _

__Watery bile spews from between his lips, shoots a torpedo onto the creature’s bared forehead. The skin cracks into a separate spiderweb, sends the spider scuttling for home, but the cracks are chasing it, forming rivers and tributaries across the creature’s nose. It stumbles backwards, smacks into the wall. From those walls, Ernest thinks he hears a scuttling. He shakes his head, groans. “Ernest!” shouts Anna from the hall, voice slightly muffled. “Are you alright?”_ _

__He vomits again, and the creature begins to wail. Its nose is splitting in half now. Chunks of its skin pitter, like rocks in a landslide, to the classroom floor. No blood spills from its veins. Small explosions of dust burst from each new splintering. The creature totters backwards, tries to whirl its arms, but they’ve fallen to pieces, too, and so helplessly it crashes to the floor, wailing. Ernest falls to his knees. The cocoon slumps over his shoulder. The creature’s howl reminds him of a train whistle, howling over plains and through mountain-range tunnels. His lip quivers. The creature shrieks. Its compass nose has completely crumbled, and it rolls, aimlessly, on the floor._ _

__

__From the PA system comes the sudden crackling of static. The creature’s howls begin to fade to trembling wheezes, then faint, haggard breaths. Shards of it are scattered across the floor, but still its eyes cannot open; only its eyeballs twitch slightly beneath their crusted shut lids. Ernest glances towards the loudspeaker. After a few moments, there’s the thud-tap of a microphone. “This is your instructor Roxanne Yarnly. I’ve heard rumors of rioting on the eighth floor, and to be frank, I’ve experienced your impropriety myself. I’ve been able to hear your awful rumbling throughout these poor third graders’ chemistry lesson. How would you feel if you’d lost the noble gases to some peasant’s war? You’d feel cheated, and certainly your parents-who have sacrificed so mercilessly to send you to this fine academy-would be furious to hear of you interrupting their children’s education. They’d clamor for your expulsion, and I will be honest with you: their thoughts don’t stray far from mine.”_ _

__Ernest groans. He’d hated third grade and its awful arithmetic._ _

__The voice coos: “Oh! But a little bluebird has just sent me a notecard. What does it say, little bird? That some of our very own students defeated that nasty rioter? Well, my word! I couldn’t be more impressed! Certainly, these victors deserve a reward-don’t they, little bird? Why, of course! I know exactly what our little champions deserve! Now, listen closely, my small victors: please trek carefully downstairs to my office. Upon the desk, I’ve placed your much-deserved reward, and I promise it’s not merely an extra helping of peaches! Come, little champions! Claim your prize!”_ _

__A thud on the microphone. The static crackles to a halt. Ernest stares at the creature. It’s stopped writhing, and now lays silent within a meadow of its own peelings. He’d think it dead if dust didn’t still stutter from its nostrils. He wonders where it was born, and what its mother called it, whether it was a he or she, and whether it liked marshmallows in its hot cocoa. _Yes_ , thinks Ernest, _I think it liked marshmallows_. _ _

__And now it is dying, reduced to a crumbling relic, noseless and laying prostrate on the classroom floor, surrounded not by family, but by its own remains. Ernest’s hands tremble. He bets it liked to listen to the radio, and it hated bomb drills on Thursdays. Bagels and cream cheese, hated bees but loved to watch film noir while their father napped, exhausted. Tears pool in Ernest’s eyes; his cheeks flush. His grandma would be proud of him, but shame washes over his eyelashes and dribbles off his chin. He throws his hand over his mouth, tastes the sour cocoon on his filthy palm._ _

__“Ernest?” asks Anna softly. She rests a hand on the doorway’s fractured edge and winces. Splinter._ _

__“It’s not breathing anymore,” whimpers Ernest._ _

__“I’m sorry you were all alone,” says Anna. She lowers her head. Her lip trembles. “Harry wouldn’t let us come in.”_ _

__“Why not?” Ernest crumbles then, collapses forward on himself. His sobs shake his shoulders. The cocoon’s head bobs. He realizes, briefly, that it’s become stuck to his shirt._ _

__“He said it was better to lose one of us than all five of us.” Dust fills the air. She coughs. “I told him that wasn’t fair, but he didn’t listen.”_ _

__“He forgot about this guy,” sniffles Ernest, gesturing wildly at the cocoon. “It would’ve been six against one. We could’ve made it sleep, or something, maybe buried it in books. I don’t know. It didn’t need to die. And I didn’t need to do it alone.”_ _

__“You didn’t need to be alone,” agrees Anna. She steps forward, extends a hand. But she glances down, remembers her claws-too pronounced, too risky-and withdraws it. She bites her lip. “But you’re not alone anymore, Ernest. We’re still here.”_ _

__“Did you guys think I could beat it?” asks Ernest, voice low. He turns his head. “Even if you guys left me.”_ _

__“I did,” says Anna. Her voice cracks._ _

__“Okay,” mumbles Ernest, wiping at his nose. “Okay.”_ _

__“We’re still here if you want to stay with us.”_ _

__“I don’t want to be alone,” whispers Ernest. Sometimes he forgets that they’re strangers, but in this moment, her foreignness catches in his throat._ _

__Anna smiles. He can’t see the heart behind it. “Never again.”_ _

__Ernest stands, wobbily. The cocoon slides from his shoulder, but he catches it. Dust swirls through the air, paints Anna’s orange dress the shade of mottled dirt. Her nose is sanded gray. He should leave them, they who left him for dead, but when he hears the imagined pitter-patter of his feet walking away, he finds only a solitary destination. Maybe he’ll go back to waiting for grandma, _or maybe_ , he thinks, _maybe I’ll find some sense_._ _

__But not today, he thinks as he follows Anna from the room, meets the downcast eyes of the others, not today._ _

__At the sight of Ernest’s dust bowl hair, Janis sets off down the hall. Her lips tighten with each paper crushed underfoot, at each passing poster hanging halfheartedly from the brick wall. “W-where are you going?” shouts Harry after her, voice hoarse. “Janis?”_ _

__“I’m off to claim our prize!” she yells, her vibrato voice echoing off the walls. “Have fun feeling ashamed, daddy!”_ _

__Harry gulps, glances back at Ernest, but Ernest has rooted his eyes to the floor. Harry wrings his hands together and tries to ignore his thick white knuckles. He likes to think he’s a moral pragmatist-he feels guilt when necessary, and flinches correctly when the shame burns his cheeks. Even so, he doubts its sanctity. Losing one to save four-basic arithmetic, a business decision, a moral decision, when you factored in his daughter. Right, a moral pragmatist. They’re always the good guys in movies._ _

__“Should we follow your lunatic?” asks Wisteria to Harry. She coughs on the dust, choking the air and winding its hands around their throats. “I won’t be disappointed if you say no.”_ _

__“Yes,” sighs Harry. “I suppose we should.”_ _

__Wisteria flaps her wings, and waterfalls tumble from her feathers. She mouths something to Anna, but Anna only blinks. The kids always used to do that-the mouthing, during class, when the teacher was teaching hopeless arithmetic. Anna never bothered to read their lips._ _

__“We should move,” mutters Ernest, elbowing her side. Anna jolts. The others have already set off, Harry’s hands shoved deep in his pockets and tired head bowed, Wisteria with her wings folded to her sides, four shrivelled fingers rubbing nervously against each other. “They’ll leave us,” says Ernest._ _

__Anna nods and hurries along beside him. Ernest walks with one burning hand over the cocoon’s eyes and the other wrapped around his stomach. His eyes train themselves to his feet. Anna bites her lip. I’m a liar, she thinks, stomach churning, but six minus one equals five, and six minus six equals zero. Basic math, Harry said, but I think I learned that somewhere else. They’re descending the stairs now. Water from a broken pipe plinks her head. It stings. I learned that in marbles, I think. More stairs, another flight. They’ve almost caught up to Wisteria and Harry, yet no one looks at each other, and they’re all walking faster, always faster. Still, she thinks as they open the lowest door, I’m glad he’s alive. They’re walking down the hall now. Empty lunchboxes line the walls. A rat scours between them; the void between its ribs tightens at each empty box. Ahead, an ornate door, gilded in gold and embroidered in spiderwebs-aside from its door handle, which has been wiped clean with a tissue. So glad._ _

__“Janis?” asks Harry tentatively. He holds his hand over the door knocker, poised. Ernest shudders as a spider crawls across the door._ _

__“Oh, daddy, it’s simply grand!” Janis’s cries._ _

__Harry smiles grimly, then turns the doorknob. Anna throws her hand over her mouth; Ernest recoils. Wisteria shivers._ _

__“Look, daddy!” says Janis. She stands beside the principal’s desk, amid a sea of papers. In the principal’s seat sits a skeleton, jaw crudely propped open, envelope propped between its ribs. Its hands, separated from its arms, rest beside the microphone. On the table, a nameplate reads _Roxanne Yarnly, 1953_ \--. Janis shoves it and the hands from the desk, smiling widely as they crash to the floor. She wrestles the envelope from the skeleton’s ribs. Her eyes widen as she reads its front. She traces her index finger over the letters; fresh ink stains its tip. “Daddy!” cries Janis. “Do you know who it’s addressed from?”_ _

__“No, Janis.” Harry smiles weakly. “Who is it?”_ _

__“Steven Stone!” Her cheeks flush; her smile brightens._ _

__Harry blanches._ _

__“Why, daddy," sings Janis, "that’s my fiancée!”_ _


	10. Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Drape your arms around me and softly say_  
>  Can we dance upon the tables again?

Janis’s eyes trace the arch of each impeccable A, follow the curves stringing letters into words; she mouths them to herself deliberately, as though she is their lover. She grips the letter’s sides tightly. Her painted nails pierce its margins. Her hair falls over her eyes, but she forgets to move it.

“Steven Stone,” repeats Harry. He rubs his temples, sighs into his chin. Anna thinks she sees a flicker of pride flash across the corners of his lips, but it vanishes into a thinly controlled scowl. “So, you didn’t think to tell me that you’re marrying the most important man in Hoenn?”

The ensuing silence pulses through the walls. With red eyes slightly glazed, Janis re-reads the letter. She mouths the punctuation to herself, lips pursing out period p’s and puckering into question mark q’s. She likes the way his punctuation tastes, all sweet and sour and utterly calculated. It tastes like her engagement ring in the store window. She bets he wrote it with his dead father’s quill, that vintage man, writing in scripts older than the fossil rock on his ring finger. She falls to the last sentence again, feels her eyelids flutter again, feels the paper clench between her fingers. 

“No one’s important in Hoenn anymore,” says Janis. She folds the letter carefully, keeping the creases even, lovely. She tucks it into her purse. She sighs, and beneath the cold neon light, seems to deflate. “The wedding’s been postponed.”

“Perhaps he thought it a tad inappropriate to marry before meeting his bride’s family?” Harry asks, voice cracking. Anna bites her lip.

“We’re going to talk about it at his office,” says Janis. She pulls a cigarette from her purse’s outer pocket, sticks it between her lips. As she fumbles with her lighter, bruised hands shaking, she says, muffled, “Alone.”

Harry’s hands shake like his daughter’s. He feels his legs sinking through the floor and his heart slumping in rickets down his vertebrae. He glances towards Anna - the only innocent, he sometimes believes, and now she knows him not as a Harry Hart, but as he truly is: the unimportant white collar shadow, and the unnecessary father. God, he’s an embarrassment. Maybe if he’d prayed once in a while, he’d, he’d...he doesn’t know, but he’d sure as hell do it. Sure as hell. He opens his mouth; his throat burns, ashamed. His voice breaks. “Don’t you think he should meet your father?”

“I’ve got errands to run,” says Janis, patting her bag. She takes a long drag. Anna coughs, and Wisteria grimaces as the smoke fills the small room. She stares out the window. “Sorry, Daddy. No time to talk.”

“Am I not important enough for Steven Stone, hm?” Harry takes a sharp breath. 

“Wow,” says Wisteria. She whistles lowly and stretches her wings over her head. She winks at Anna. “Shoulda brought some popcorn, eh?”

Harry looks at her helplessly. Janis stares out the open door, out the window, towards the towering smokestacks. She tucks her purse under her arm and turns towards the door. She purses her lips. “I’m going alone.”

Anna stares through the silence at the skeleton, sitting erect in the principal’s seat, jaw still propped open like a crude cartoon’s caricature. Dust has settled in its eye sockets. Its wrists, now handless, linger incomplete on the desk’s edge. A bullet is lodged in its frontal lobe. So who was on the PA? Anna steps forward, slips past Janis and her frozen hands. She reaches for the silver bullet, but Janis slaps her hand away. “Don’t touch that,” hisses Janis.

“I’m not afraid of bones,” says Anna. She proudly continues. “My father once showed me how to skin a rabbit.”

“Were you raised in a cave?” Janis sighs, then runs a hand through her hair. Anna seems to shrink. “Though I suppose this whole damn city’s a cave, if you really think about it.” She tosses her cigarette on the floor, squishes it into the tile with the toe of her high, high heels. “And we’re all just waiting to be eaten by the wolves.”

“We’re coming with you,” says Harry, voice quavering. Janis looks at him sharply. Harry’s hands quiver in his pockets; he dwindles beneath her wronged bloodshot eyes. He stares at the floor hating the way she hates him, and in his lowered gaze, he misses the softening in her cheeks.

Janis reaches in her purse for another smoke. When closing the pack she hesitates, then pulls out another cigarette. She offers it to Harry. He stares at it for a moment, jaw slightly dropped, before taking it with slow, shaking hands. He props it between his lips, and Janis lights it. He takes a long drag as she lights her own. “We’re going to be a happy family for Steven,” says Janis, smoke dancing around her halo of dirty hair. Harry’s smile lights the whole room. Janis swallows, flicks ash onto the skeleton’s grimy sternum. “You know, Daddy, you never should’ve taught me to sing.”

\---

They’re stalking through Hoenn’s bottom level now, much to Harry’s distaste. On the bottom level live the scrubbers, who wash their teeth with shoe polish and pick their teeth with the bones of their victims. Or so his boss had told him, back when he had a boss. Harry reckons most of them had snuck in among the first wave of migration, posing as servants or performers or whatnot. The rest, he assumes, probably escaped the Mossdeep Madhouse that Christmas Eve...he glances behind him at Anna, who walks beside Ernest, and whose chin is raised towards the high stalagmite ceiling, and whose eyes search the sides of high rises for the beast. She’s a good kid, thinks Harry, eyes and ears searching for the crunch of newspaper underfoot, the heavy, hauling breath of a scrubber stranded on the floor, their shadows painting the narrow alleyways.

Ernest pulls an arm around his belly and the other over the cocoon’s back. It’s heavier than it was in the school, and its sticky shell burns his shoulder less and less. But still the withering of those whirring arms haunts his breath and swirls his belly into knots. He keeps glancing at his hands, expecting blood to paint his knuckles. His ears yearn for the dust child’s wailing, but he hears only the quiet hum of Hoenn’s neon lights. 

They snake through a small series of alleyways, feet crunching on old food containers, shoulders brushing against musty graffiti. Where is the bomb? rubs white paint against Anna’s skirt’s hem. _What bomb_? she wonders, _and what voice_? She feels the air thicken with mystery, and wishes to dispel it with her mother’s musty broom. But in Hoenn mystery floods from dripping taps, paints itself upon each neon sign, each dusty corridor, and fills Anna’s little hands with a full, trembling dread. She thinks of the beast, of Own, of that small sloping boy, of the skeleton propped in the principal’s room, and shudders. All so unfamiliar, so unexplained! She’d like very much to be resting on her front porch swing, the barn cat all coiled up beside her, the summer cicadas chirping them to sleep. She’d like very much to be home. She tugs at Harry’s sleeve. “Harry,” she says.

“Lower your voice, Anna,” says Harry quietly. His cigarette is nearly at the filter, but he continues to puff away at it.

“When can I go home?”

Harry frowns. “I told you a long time ago. You sealed the last latch when you stumbled upon the city.”

“But,” says Anna, lip quivering, “surely there is another one?”

Harry’s face softens. He opens his mouth, but Wisteria speaks instead. “There’s two.”

All except Janis, who walks ahead with her head bowed and heels clacking, turn to look at her.

“Why, that’s impossible!” exclaims Harry.

“Where?” asks Ernest.

Wisteria shrugs. “I’ve never been to them, but my brother did once. He says there’s one by the sewers, where they used to do imports and all that. The other one’s gotta be up in,” - she points towards the central pillar - “that son of a bitch, all the way at the top of it. There’s no way they sealed themselves up there without an escape latch.”

Anna claps her hands together; Harry shushes her. She bites her lip, but then, whispering excitedly: “so we can get out?”

“Maybe once we’re done with those two’s family drama,” says Wisteria, smiling down at Anna. “But, if today was any indication, that seems to be winding down, huh?”

Harry rolls his eyes but smiles to himself. His cigarette has finally withered into filter, and he tosses it into an abandoned pile of filthy blankets. “Are we almost there?” he whisper-calls ahead to Janis.

She turns her head slightly. “Yeah,” she says. “Crazy how quiet it is down here today, isn’t it?”

Harry nods.

“I bet Steven cleared it all out for me with that magic tongue of his - you know the moment he opens his mouth, the scrubbers all scramble off. Just scramble off! It’s grand, you know, watching someone so powerful doing his job. It’s like watching a god at work.”

“How did you two meet?” asks Harry. He ups his pace, catches up to her. Behind him Anna, Wisteria, and Ernest walk faster.

“I met him at work,” says Janis.

“You were the lounge singer, yes?” asks Harry. He smiles, awkwardly.

“Something like that.”

“There’s a clearing up ahead. We should be careful.”

Janis looks up, red eyes cloudy at the towering, building across the impending plaza. In one of its gaping glass windows, she catches sight of a stately figure. He stands with his arms behind his back. At the raising of her chin, he nods, then steps to the left, out of sight. “We’ll be fine,” she says, lighting up another cigarette.

They step into the plaza. Their footsteps echo off the cold floor, the high-reaching buildings. Anna glances up at the sky; she winces, imagining the harsh flap of the beast’s leather wings. But, nothing. Not a clatter in the alleys. Not a shout from the dumpsters. 

They continue towards the grand marble building. When she squints, Anna can make out the words, “Dewford Tower,” engraved over its pillars. 

They’ve reached the grand doors now. Anna reaches for the handle, but stops as Janis veers to the left, stops in front of an old man, hunched behind a pillar. He clutches a leash, which, as Anna follows its snaking line, ends at the thick neck of a deformed child, whose arms have grown into fat, bluish white wings, and whose nose has grown to a nigh monstrous size, shadowing his thin lips and sunken in chin. “Hello, Briney,” says Janis.

“Has Steven got bored?” asks Briney, grinning. His smile seems too wide for his face. His front teeth are nearly black.

“How’s Peeko?” asks Janis, nodding at the boy. He blinks.

“Peeko’s doin’ lovely, lovely,” says Briney, tipping his hat. “You going up?”

“Would you unlock the door?” asks Janis. Briney cocks his head to the side. She clenches her fists. Her knuckles whiten. She hisses, “Please.”

“No need to get nasty, miss.” Briney puts his hands up, shakes his head. He stands up slowly, keys jingling in his pockets; the leash jerks, and Peeko yelps.

“I have to see Steven,” says Janis, voice steeling. “Please, Briney. It’s important. The wedding’s been postponed.”

Briney bursts into laughter. It echoes through the plaza. Harry glances behind them, shoulders tensing. Briney continues to laugh, slapping his knee and hooting. Peeko flails about as his leash is jerked up, then down. When Briney throws his hand over his mouth, laughter tears pouring from his eyes, Peeko is pulled off the ground, and his face turns red as the chain tightens around his neck. Briney lowers his hand to his waist after a moment, digs into his pocket for his keys. Peeko wheezes. Anna bites her lip. Briney walks, still chuckling to himself and wiping the tears from his grimy cheeks, to a door tucked behind the final pillar. Behind him drags Peeko, head scraping along the stone floor, little feet flailing all about. The keys jingle in Briney’s hands as he unlocks the side door, still hooting to himself. He gives Janis a little bow as she approaches. “You taking your daddy up to meet him?” asks Briney.

“Is he okay?” asks Ernest, pointing at Peeko. The leash boy takes deep gasping breaths. His feet quiver.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Briney, waving his hand back and forth. “The boy’s a tough one. Gets it from his mother, I’ll reckon.”

“You’re disgusting,” says Janis to Briney, curling her lip. “You shortened his leash again, didn’t you?”

“The boy kept runnin’ away from me! He always chasin’ after them scrubbers, ‘specially them lady ones. Always chasin’ the skirts, me boy. That’s how I know he’s mine, heheh. But I can’t let him run away on me, that’d be cruel, miss.”

“You should, um,” says Anna, “you should let him go. It looks like he’s hurt.”

“You should put that one on a leash,” says Briney to Harry. “She your other daughter, right?”

“Ah, um, no,” says Harry, scratching the back of his head awkwardly.

Janis reaches into her purse and pulls out a pair of scissors. She bends over, snip snips the leash’s worn fabric until it falls, broken into two, from Briney’s hand. Peeko scampers off immediately, little feet pushing against the floor madly, massive nose aimed low like a piledriver. “You fuckin’ witch,” growls Briney, spitting at Janis’s shoes. He scrambles after his son, stumbling over his untied shoes and swearing at the top of his lungs.

His curses follow them inside the side door and into a long, pristine hallway. Doors line its side, with potted ferns placed on either side of each door. They’ve been watered recently, Anna notes. Water droplets dribble down the side of the closest door’s pot. Janis smiles, slightly, then pushes the door open.

A small bar and a lounge table decorate the room. A large ashtray has been placed in the center of the table. The bar is freshly stocked. On the bar counter sits a fresh bouquet of flowers picked from God knows where. Janis scratches her shoulder, winces as a recent scab opens. “Are you okay?” asks Harry.

Janis stalks behind the bar, reaches below it for a bottle of whiskey. From the fancy engravings on the cap, Anna guesses it’s pretty expensive. She pours herself a shot, then downs it. Wiping whiskey and lipstick from her mouth, she answers. “I don’t think you’ve ever asked me that, Daddy.”

“I, um--”

“No, no. It’s okay. I’ve just had an awful couple of years, and now I’m standing here, waiting on the doorstep of Mt. Olympus, feeling like a goddamn fool. A goddamn fool! Daddy, I’ve made a pun. Did you hear it? All fools are damned, silly things. Silly damn, damn things.” She pours herself another shot. Downs it. “But I’ll get in next year. I’ll always get in next year. Beautiful, silly me.”

“Janis,” says Harry. He’s forgotten how to be kind to his daughter. “You, ah, should, um, sit down.”

“Have you ever been on Mount Olympus, Daddy?” She pours another shot. “Well, it’s really grand, and we all wear white dresses and suits, and we braid our hair with wine leaves, and drink the highest champagne, and wear masks. Beautiful masks, carved like little woodland creatures. Everyone on Olympus hates each other, so they never want to know who they’re kissing. And Steven’s the grand, silver king of Mount Olympus, and you know, maybe he’s testing me. Every year I walk a little farther. I’ll just have to return to work again, that’s all. I’m sure the Mauville Main’s just bustling to see me back!” She cough-laughs harshly, clutching the shot glass against her chest. She coughs again. “It’s just so...so grand. And everyone loves a singer, don’t they?”

Harry reaches across the bar counter for Janis’s shoulder, but she’s walking around the bar now, towards the lounge table. She clutches the shot glass tighter, taking quick, shallow breaths. “Dear god, how I don’t want to go back to work again, in this awful filthy city. Daddy, where did I put my whiskey?” she whirls around. Harry steps towards her. She starts; the shot glass hurtles into the floor, explodes over her high heels. “Shit! Oh, Daddy, oh god! I’ve gone and wrecked it all. All of it! Oh, who would want to marry a silly girl like me, all slippery fingered and dirty haired!”

Tears pour down her face. She sniffles, brings a hand to her face. “I could’ve gone to Olympus, Daddy. But now I’m stuck down here.”

Awkwardly, Harry puts a hand on her shoulder. Janis flinches, but then, slowly, eases. “I’m sorry,” says Harry. “Really, I am.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” says Janis, wiping at her nose, smiling. Sadly: “I know you messed up with me, but it’s okay, Daddy. It’s okay. I’m just sorry about me and everything, that’s all.”

Harry feels the tears welling up in his eyes. Instead of stopping them, as he always does, he lets them fall. He pulls his daughter into a hug, and she lets him hug her, quietly, with none of her teenage protest or her mad adult raving. “It’ll be okay, Janis,” he says, “I can help you-”

There is a knock at the door.

Janis pulls away quickly, starts running a hand through her filthy hair, pats the imaginary compact on her cheeks. Harry stands behind her, awkwardly, before he waves him towards the lounge table. “Sit at the highest stool,” she whispers. “Try to look regal. The rest of you go sit with him.”

They all shuffle towards the lounge table, and plant themselves in various seats. Harry sits in the tallest seat, squares his shoulders, lets his lips slide into a welcoming smile. Anna climbs to the seat beside him. Wisteria slumps in a chair near the wall. Ernest, finding no remaining chair, perches atop the table, the cocoon draped over his shoulder like a robe.

Janis runs her hand through her hair again. She puts on her biggest smile, and cocks her hip out the side. “Come in, darling!” she calls, voice warmer than honey.

The door slides open. Steven Stone stands there, motionless and kingly in a sleek black suit.

He reaches into his pocket.

Anna catches a glimpse of silver, the ugly flash of neon light against the rounded barrel and then--

Crack.

Time seems to have stopped. Janis slumps over, hand reaching for the sudden hole inside her stomach, fingertips stained with blood. “O-o-oh my g-god,” she breathes, swaying side to side. Steven cocks the trigger again. 

Harry rushes from his stool, lets it topple to the floor. “Oh my god,” he whispers, his hand trembling over his face. “Janis, oh my god.”

“Daddy-” chokes Janis. Blood drips from her lips, repaints them their once fearsome red.

Harry reaches for her hand, shaking like a hurricane tree. “Janis, stop bleeding!” he cries.

Crack.

Janis falls backwards, left foot flying up first, followed gracelessly by her right. Her head smacks against the floor with a sickening thud. Another hole gapes through her heart. Noiselessly, her lips flubber open and shut. Her hands shake madly. Harry falls to his knees and grabs one, presses it against its face just to feel it quiver, alive. The blood pours from her heart and her lips, and she’s dressed all in sticky red now, like a real goddess, oh god-- Anna starts to cry, but Wisteria throws her wings over both the children’s eyes, squeezes her own shut and grits her teeth together as though grinding them into dust.

“Janis, Janis, Janis,” mutters Harry, choking on a sob. Her hands are slowing down, as are her blood-soaked lips. “Janis, please. I told you I’m sorry. I really meant it. Don’t do this, please. Please, just stop. Janis, please- please, please, stop.” But her hands have quieted to little trembles, and her purple eyelids no longer flutter. “What are you doing, Janis? Where are you going? Please stay. We can build you a new Mt. Olympus, Janis. Janis, please. Oh god, please!” But her hands have stopped. Slowly the warmth leaches out of them, leaves the blood staining Harry’s sleeves and trousers. “Oh my god,” he whispers to himself, brown eyes wide and broken. “Oh my god.”

Steven Stone tucks the pistol back in his coat. Harry rises suddenly. “She’s dead,” he says simply.

“Go back to your mourning,” says Steven Stone. His voice is like velvet.

“I should kill you,” says Harry.

Steven Stone once more pulls the pistol from his coat. He aims it at Harry’s forehead, cocks the trigger. Sweat drips down his forehead. His hand trembles. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Harry Hart. You’re a coward. You know exactly when to give up, don’t you?" Steven's voice cracks. "Those damn burglars killed your wife, and you let them get away, because you valued your life more than hers. Now you’re about to do the same damn thing.”

Tentatively, Harry takes a step forward. Steven cocks the trigger again. “Well, Harry Hart. Do you value your own life?”

Harry stands still for a moment. His lip trembles. Steven Stone slips through the door, slides it shut. His footsteps echo down the hall, walking, walking, then pattering to a frantic sprint, louder then growing fainter and fainter--until his silence finally fills the room. Janis’s blood has started to smell.

Harry falls to his knees and cries.


	11. The Procession and The Henchman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Miles and miles in my bare feet  
>  Still can't lay me down to sleep_

Harry has been sitting on the floor for a long, long time. Stiffness creeps through his spine and invades the creases beneath his eyes. He stares down at the blood on his shirt. He’d ironed it yesterday morning. It had looked so pristine, like the shirt of a manager late to the meeting, or an on-time interviewee. Now it smells like Janis’s early demise, all spilled across his buttons and over that tiled luxury floor. He thinks he feels the children’s eyes burrowing into his stooped back. They’re afraid to look at the body, to feel her wholehearted absence.

But she was always absent, wasn’t she? Missing from class, missing at home, mind and eventually feet reborn runaways, whose heels only sunk into the dirt once they’d run out of money to run on. Or that’s how Harry saw it, anyway. He’d been the one to set it off, he reckons. One job lost, two hopeful hopeless syringes sidled into blue, blue veins. A week after the shot, she said proudly, “You should’ve seen those other kids, gnawing at their legs on the playground.” Harry frowned; he could see the red leaking watercolors into her child’s eyes, feel the ants crawling over her frontal lobe--or so he thought. He only heard of her from a distance. The old misses from next door--what were their names? Winnie, Lydia something or another. They’d said their daughters had spotted her at a royal ball, singing with long nails digging gashes in her arms. He’d been nearly proud of her, until they said she’d been seen later that night chasing a bottle down Railroad Street, a bottle of pills spilling like secrets from her purse and a jagged tear in her skirt. His face had reddened, and he’d excused himself.

Harry shudders.

Still perched on the table, little Anna presses her face into Wisteria’s feathers. Her knees knock together, and her fists clench the folds of her dress. She’d never feared the tiny bones of rabbits--not when her daddy shot them or when he skinned them or when he hung up their carcasses in the smoke house--but in this closed, luxurious room, Janis’s blood stench fills her lungs, clogs the area beneath her tongue with its terrible thickness. Anna tries not to breathe. Her ears hunt the hall for returning footsteps, the silver pistol’s much-dreaded second act. He’ll kill her first, she knows, and she is so afraid. 

Eyes squeezed shut, she wonders if Janis will stumble up, lurching sloppily, lips pressed into a grim, reassuring smile. Maybe she’ll say it was all a wild joke between her and Steven, that wild couple to be! Then she’ll rant on about some god or another, slip a kind word between insults, then, upon the dimming of the lights, blissfully drink herself to sleep. She’s breathing right now, Anna can hear it! Anna pushes Wisteria’s wing from her eyes, slides her lids open and--! 

Janis’s blood-spattered lips gape open, motionless. Her throat had stopped rattling an hour ago.

Anna pulls Wisteria’s wing over her eyes again. She begins to cry. She feels a hand on her back, rubbing small, sad circles. “It’s okay, Anna,” she hears Ernest whisper. She wonders if he is forgiving her, or if he has only put her cruelty aside for now. He says, “She’s in a better place.”

She feels Wisteria nod.

Across the room, Harry stands. Numbly, he says, “We have to take her to the crematorium.”

Anna pictures her father’s grill, little rabbits’ feet sizzling upon its surface. She tries to remember Janis’s voice but already she has lost it. She cries harder. “Why can’t we bury her?” she asks between hiccups.

“Bodies bring rats; rats bring disease. The last outbreak wiped out the entire Fallarbor neighborhood. If they all hadn’t been quarantined and their bodies burned up, the whole city would have have died from consumption. That’s what the announcements said, anyway,” Harry replies gruffly. He bends over, attempts to pull Janis from the floor. Her dress slops awfully against the marble floor. Harry’s lips roll over each other. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, bows his head, before continuing. He prays to god that she will go to god. He manages to pull her over his back, but the weight is too much and the floor is too slippery and he falls, her weight sloshing and crunching against his back.

Wisteria jumps off the table, steps gingerly around the shattered glass to Harry’s side. She bends over. “Put her torso on my back,” she says. “You hold her legs. Can you do that, Harry?”

Lip trembling again, Harry nods, distant. With great effort he hauls Janis’s body onto Wisteria’s xylophone spine. She grunts, takes a deep breath, then, shakily: “I need you to hold her legs.”

“Oh!” replies Harry, startled. He reaches forward too quickly, pushes her leg too hard. Wisteria winces, and he begins to cry. “Shit,” Harry whispers. “Shit.”

“It’s okay,” says Wistera. A long, shuddering sigh. Her knobby knees tremble under Janis’s weight. “I’m sorry about your daughter.”

“Me too,” Harry whispers. Gentler now, he grabs Janis’s calves. They start shuffling towards the door, a macabre funeral procession, mourner’s eyes hunting not for eulogies but for unbloodied spots to step on. Ernest scampers to the door. His sweaty palms slip on the knob, but, just as Wisteria’s bowed head approaches, he manages to turn it. He ducks out of the way as they pass, then darts beside Wisteria. He pushes himself beneath Janis’s left side, supports it on the shoulder unoccupied by the cocoon. As her cold shoulder presses into his own, the cocoon quivers. Ernest starts and the procession shivers, but then as if never disturbed, they continue shambling down the pristine white hall, leaving a trail of bloodstained tracks behind them.

Little footsteps cry after them. Anna steps in front of Harry, reaches her small arms as high as she can. Her fingertips barely scrape Janis’s calves, but she holds her arms up anyway, just to be of some imagined use. Behind her, Harry nearly smiles. 

A moment of silence, then: “There’s a man ahead,” says Ernest, nervous. “He’s really big. He looks kinda mean.”

“He’s not going to fight us,” grunts Wisteria.

“Does he have a gun?” whispers Anna. Her voice is hoarse.

“Just really big fists,” says Ernest.

Voice cracking, Anna asks, “Are we all going to die?” 

“Not if I can help it,” says Harry roughly, heavily. His nails dig into Janis’s legs. Glancing down, he immediately loosens his grip, shivers as shame washes over his cold neck. His lip trembles. 

Without Janis's chatter to carry the conversation, they fall silent. Only the sound of their footsteps and the little quivers of the cocoon against Ernest’s back trickle through the hall. Ernest thinks he hears a crack in the cocoon’s casing, but unable to turn his head for fear of dropping Janis, he can only imagine its breaking out.

The man at the end of the hall grows bigger and bigger as they approach. He stands a little taller than the door, and his shoulders stretch across the hallway’s width. His mouth slumps into a frown. He squints at their red parade. “Are you Harry Hart?” he calls down the hall, words booming off the windowsills.

“Yes,” replies Harry. His voice whispers to the doorway man, who leans forward ear first, lips parted to just catch the bare tendrils of Harry’s reply.

“I didn’t quite hear you,” the doorway man shouts back. “My name is Brawly. Steven told me to escort you to the docks.”

“Did he?” mutters Harry. 

“Does that _fucker_ think he can waltz right in here, kill that whacked out dead girl, then offer his fuckin’ services?” Wisteria shouts at the doorway man. She stumbles over the last word, nearly bites her tongue. “You can fuck right off to the cave you crawled out of, _sir_.”

The man cocks his head to the side. “Have we met before?” he calls.

“My mom always said she thought he had something to do with it,” Wisteria hisses to herself. She shouts, “Now that I think about it, you look pretty familiar. Yeah, I think you came into my class once”--she heaves a great breath, words choking under Janis’s dead weight--”with a whole pocketful of syringes. You didn’t look like a total fuckin’ freak back then, but, you know, Own will fuck up a lot about a person, especially when it’s not their own choice to use it.”

Anna’s arms suddenly feel very heavy.

Harry hangs his head. Fuck it, he’s crying again.

The doorway man’s hands tremble. 

“Do you feel bad, old man? ‘Cause you should. And I hope you feel bad for a long, long time,” Wisteria says. Though they’re close enough to speak plainly with him, she still shouts. Anna can make out the deep creases in the doorway man’s cheeks, the panic brimming in his squinted eyes. She almost feels sorry for him. Wisteria keeps shouting. “At that point everyone knew you’d all fucked it up, you told us it was a vaccine. God, you look like you’re going to cry. Go ahead and do it. I dare you.”

Harry wonders what Janis would say to this, whether she’d condemn his trembling hand or his past shaking voice. “You’ll be stronger,” he had said to her, syringe poised in his right hand. “Your voice will never crack again.”

The crack of a pistol. He shudders, tries his best to swallow the lump in his throat. Her legs slip; he adjusts his grip. The blood has dried under his nails.

The doorway man turns towards the door. His shoulders shake. He sniffles. His huge hands fumble with the knob. 

“They called you Mr. Brawly, right? Well, Mr. Brawly, you’d better run.” Wisteria coughs. They stand in the man’s massive, quivering shadow, waiting with tired breaths for him to fumble open the lock. 

“Are you okay, Wisteria?” asks Ernest softly. He rolls back his shoulder, tries to calm the cocoon’s wild shakes and cracks. “You’ve never really talked this much.”

“I’m pissed,” she snaps. “I only like talking when I’m mad. Move, you old piece of shit!”

“Why do you hate him so much?”

“That’s a story for another time. _Move it_!” 

The door slides open and the man rushes to hunch himself over, sidle his huge hips and rippling hands through the doorway. Sweat drips from his face. Blabbering through puckered, frightened lips, he cries out: “It was all for the best, sorry, sorry, really, but you don’t want to die, do you? God, Steven will kill me before it all blows, too soon, shoot.” A purple spray shoots from the cocoon’s cracked cage (through its splinters Anna catches sight of a small, folded leg), splatters and sizzles over his face. Mr. Brawly yelps, hurdles forward. He trips over something as he rambles from the building. Briney’s saltshaker howls fill the hall. As the procession trails from the building, Brawly rumble tumbles down the stairs, chased by Briney’s crumb-filled beard and his little leashed Peeko, whose face burns blue and whose little limbs flail at the buttons of his newly tightened collar as he drags behind his raging father. 

Within moments the plaza has cleared. Unencumbered, they lumber across the bare gray stone. Janis’s body grows heavier with each step. Beneath the distant neon light, her glass eyes almost seem alive.

They reach the lake’s docks in fifteen minutes. Silently, they load her into a cart. Her legs flop uselessly over its metal edge. Her hair falls over the cart’s back, dances itself into ballet spirals over the murky water’s dull surface. Her mouth hangs slightly open. She looks surprised, as though she had believed she would be buried in a tomb adorned in bluebells and just now feels the cart’s cold steel against her limp fingers and the gaping hole over her heart. 

Anna stands back, hands held like statues over her heart, as Harry crosses her arms across her chest and tucks her blood-matted hair behind her ear. Heavy eyed, he whispers something soft to her, then steps back. He reaches for the lever to send her railing down the lake’s track, to the crematorium’s ashen basement and its furnace’s unhinged jaws, but Wisteria places her two withered fingers on his arm, tells him, “Wait.” 

“She needs a funeral,” she says. Harry stands stiff. 

“I can go first, if you want.” Wisteria clears her throat, ruffles her shoulder feathers. Anna sits in front of her; Ernest plops to the ground beside Anna. Harry crosses his arms over his chest, stares at the blood plastered over his wrists. Wisteria clears her throat again before beginning. “I, um, didn’t know Janis too well. Behind all her big talk, she seemed like she had a tough life, which I, um, I sympathize with. She had great taste in dresses, and she smoked the same cigarettes as my mom... She was a whole lot crazier than my mom, though, but I think she couldn’t handle the hand she got dealt”--Harry’s face falls, Wisteria’s voice cracks--”and that’s what hurt her a lot in the end. I feel like she lived a whole lot of her life alone, but, um, she didn’t die alone, and that’s what counts, right? And I don’t think she’s going to be alone where she’s going, wherever she thought she was going.” 

Wisteria bows her head, steps back. Sadly, Harry smiles at her. 

She nods, swallows hard. “Ernest, you want to go next?”

Nervously Ernest stands. He takes Wisteria’s place as she settles on Anna’s other side. She sighs deeply; in the deep silence of the dead air and water, Anna hears her heart pounding wildfire. Like Wisteria, Ernest takes a moment to clear his throat. He blushes furiously as he begins. “Even though she wasn’t very nice to her dad, she set Peeko free, so I think she was a pretty nice lady.” His face flushes scarlet. “Yeah.”

He scrambles back to his seat, pulls his knees to his chest and shoves his face into them. On his shoulder, the cocoon calms. Anna pats his back. When he looks up at her, she sees he is crying. “That was good,” she says, smiling. Weakly but genuinely, he smiles back. 

“You wanna go, Anna?” asks Wisteria. 

Ernest’s butterflies flee from his stomach to Anna’s, and the neon lights spin around her as she stands. Red creeps over her face. She takes Wisteria’s place, takes deep breaths, takes comfort in Harry’s sad smiling eyes. “She always seemed kind of sad, like she would never really get over how sad she was, and she’d decided just to live with it the only way she could. She liked to pretend that she hated everyone, but I talked to her a lot one night and she was very kind to me, and she also very afraid of everyone and very sad about a lot of awful things. Um. I-I’m sorry, Harry, I-I-I don’t know what I’m saying. I just mean that I think she cared about you a whole lot and maybe the rest of us too, and I just wish she was still here, that’s all.”

Anna’s face burns. She lowers her head, bites her lip, feels hot tears welling up in her eyes as she squeezes them shut. Oh, how she always messes things up! 

Then, a hand in her hair, an awkward ruffling of her bangs. “Thank you, Anna,” comes Harry’s voice. 

Through her tears, she smiles. 

“Do you want to go, Harry?” asks Wisteria.

“Sometimes I hated her,” he says quietly, shame prickling goosebumps over his arms. “I think I finally saw her towards the end, and now I’m just very, very sad, and I think I will be for a very long time.”

With that, he pulls the lever. The cart starts with a ghastly lurch, then begins its rusty crick-crack towards the central pillar, sloshing through the lake’s murky waters and the reflection of those ever-staring neon lights. Harry watches it for a while, all jerky and graceless with Janis’s black hair twisting a funeral veil’s trail behind it. He watches as the crematorium’s gate rises, and swallows up his daughter’s spiraling hair and twice gunshot body. He then returns home, the three children in tow, all silent. After fixing a shoddy dinner, he stumbles to his bedroom, falls like an anvil upon his bed, and then sleeps for a long, long time.


	12. Interlude: Ghosting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I won't put white into your hair  
>  I won't make noises in your stairs_

“Do you believe in ghosts?” asks Ernest. He lays upon the filthy living room rug, cracked cocoon clutched to his chest, black eyes locked to a greyish-green splotch on the ceiling.

Anna lays face down on the couch. She mumbles something into the cushion.

“I feel like I see them all the time,” Ernest says. In the bathroom the shower faucet turns; Wisteria’s wing tumbles a rack of towels to the floor. She swears. Ernest continues. “Not the white sheets with eyes cut out kind of ghosts, but in people’s eyes, I mean.” 

“I miss my dad,” says Anna, voice muffled by worn torn leather. 

“Sometimes I think I see real ones, though. I read a book about it once. It said there’s different kinds of hauntings--apparitions, poltergeists, nice ghosts and mean ghosts. I think about it a lot. That little boy”-he rubs his thin lips together, squeezes his eyes shut for a moment-”that one in the school. The dusty one. I keep wondering what kind of ghost he would be. T-the book said if you die in a bad way, you’ll come back as a ghost. I kinda killed him, I guess, and the book says that’ll make him into something fierce. Even though I feel super awful about it he’s got to be an angry ghost now. I’m scared of going to sleep, Anna. What if he comes back to haunt me?”

“I bet they miss me up there,” whispers Anna. She shivers. On the surface, it must be October--cold dripping from clouds through the soil, red gold leaves spiralling 360s, 720s from skyscraper trees (uncommon in Nebraska, but preserved by her mother’s favorite pond, the one with the lovely picnics), masked children haunting the Halloween streets. They used to drive all the way to the big city to trick or treat. Like all girls in her class, Anna was going to go as Dorothy this year. Perhaps if she clicks her heels together...

Ernest squeezes the cocoon tighter. “Maybe he’ll stay in the school. The book said if you die in a place, you’re stuck there. Most of the time. It also said some ghosts follow people. He already follows me in my head, but I just...I don’t want him to follow me for real. The book says they’ll scratch up your arms and back and hurt you real bad, especially if you hurt them when they were alive. Worse if you killed them.”

“We might’ve had a cat at home,” says Anna, “but I don’t quite remember now.”

“I’ll bet Janis is going to haunt all of us, too. She seems like that kind of ghost. She wouldn’t care who she haunted, just as long as someone was paying attention. I bet she’s haunting Harry really bad, though. He had all these ghosts in his eyes.” 

“I’m going to go home,” says Anna. 

“I’ve been thinking about her a lot, too. It hasn’t even been twelve hours since she died, but I feel like it’s been a very long time. I don’t remember her face anymore. I guess I didn’t know her all that well, but it still makes me sad. Maybe that’s it! Maybe when you forget someone, that’s when they become a real ghost. You can’t remember anything about them, so they come back to jog your memory, maybe scare you a little bit, if you scared them when they were alive or if they think you’re getting soft. I’m not making sense, sorry. I don’t know how to handle today. I can’t sleep. Sorry.”

“I’m going to go home,” repeats Anna, a little louder.

++

The house is more symmetrical than he remembers it. Smaller, too, with towering pine trees sprouting from where the children’s bedrooms should be. They dwarf the house in their great jagged shadows, and enshrine its flaking roof and boarded over windows in their needled arms. Using one of their branches (he forgets how he knows this, but somehow he does, and somehow he accepts this), a scar of white paint has been scraped from the house’s door, dashing an ugly frown across the house’s grey face. It is raining and his head weighs centuries.

He takes a lumbering step forward. The ground quivers beneath him. He yelps, snaps his eyes to the travesty under his feet. His father’s cobblestone path has been dug up and replaced with haphazardly laid planks, who creak achey groans with each step. He fears that each is waiting to snap beneath his heavy feet, and he’ll fall feet first down a rabbit’s hole, where mama rabbit will snap him up in her yellowing buckteeth, pink nose twitching wildly. She’ll feed him to her young. They’ll grow up good and strong.

So he creeps a snail’s crawl, foot after foot stepping purposefully on the planks’ useless nails. He hopes they’ll be screwed deeper into the earth, so deep that maybe, just maybe they’ll fall into the city, crash gashes in its highrise roofs. He doesn’t like to think about the city. This is a dream, after all. They’re supposed to be fun.

He’s at the front door now. He frowns at its ugly wound. As the rain pounds on, the house seems to sink a little into the mud. He dances nervously, weight shifting rockets from foot to foot before he smooths his hands on his pants, runs a hand through his waterlogged hair, calms his horse race heart. He must look like a misplaced swamp man. Were he to open the door on himself, with his bloodied white shirt plastered to his chest, beard longer than a half-smoked cigarette, hair too long for business, and hands too shaky for executive orders, he surely would call the police. A damn shame, that’s what he is. A goddamn shame.

He opens the door. As he shuts it behind him he hears a high-pitched giggle; he surveys the room. He is alone, but goosebumps bubble on his arms.

Someone has painted the walls grey, thrown white sheets over the furniture. The white carpet has been torn out, and a thick layer of dust coats the floor. How many hours had he and his wife--Deborah, yes, that is her name--spent painstakingly laying it over the hideous hardwood? He wonders if He shakes his head and feels as though the ceiling is pressing on his shoulders; an increasing odor of decay breathes from the windows’ concealed pane. A bone-wracking shudder rattles within him, but he swallows it like an uncomfortably large pill. 

From beneath one sheet comes the sudden crackle of television static. He jumps, presses a trembling hand over his heart. A man’s voice: “The United States has made clear its readiness to assist economically…” He falls before the television, presses his ear against its dust-covered sheet, as though listening for a long yearned for love letter. The voice sounds like a surface man, confident but dead, or so Old Stone said he should be. Perhaps it’s a recording from the war, nothing new, just destruction already passed. “...the new and independent governments of these countries. We have already--some days since--been in contact with the new Government of Poland on this matter. We have also publicly declared that we do not demand of these governments their adoption of any particular form of society as a condition upon our economic assistance. Our one concern is that they be free--for their sake, and for freedom's sake.”

He remembers none of these politics. His stomach contorts. The radios were taken after the people stopped pounding on the hatches, after the surface forgot or died. We need what you own so you can become your own. They’re supposed to be dead. That’s what Old Stone said over the loudspeakers. Red haired Anna is just a remnant. The bomb hit hard, but who would bomb Nebraska? That’s what Old Stone had said, wasn’t it? 

“Who would bomb Nebraska?” 

_But where is the bomb, Old Stone?_

He stands up. The TV drones on as he walks into the kitchen. 

There’s that giggle again. He shivers, but he’s alone, always alone. He turns to the room. A razor has been forgotten in the kitchen sink. He remembers that he is hungry. Starving, almost. He rummages through the cupboards (force of habit excuse him, excuse him), but only finds fingerprints dabbled in the dust. “...to remove any false fears that we would look upon new governments…” He turns around. The razor now sits on the counter. The kitchen has changed. The fridge hangs slightly open. The cupboards have shut.

The TV’s crackles deepen. The Television man’s voice folds upon itself, dipping deep into coal mines before rising to the crow’s nest pitch, repeat, repeat. A sham, not a man--the voice of a begotten prophet, whose eyes are made of coal and whose tongue speaks only impossibilities. That was the bomb, he’s finally heard it! He storms back to the living room and with fierce trembling hands tears the sheet from the scorned television, raises a hand to smack the balding suit jacket man from its monochrome face, but his face is changing, growing older and he’s smiling now, like a real buffoon with a wire pulling his eyelid up, up, and up. 

The giggle. He whirls around as the buffon still rambles; he curls his hands into fists. He rushes through the room, peeking beneath dead dust sheets, finding only foreign oddities. A stain on the couch cushion, two faces torn from their family portrait (lucky him, the successful survivor), a price tag on his coffee table, tactfully hiding his wife’s teacup stain. Barbed wire circles grandmother’s rocking chair’s spires. “I now turn to that other part of the world where, at this moment, the situation is somber,” says the television man. 

He runs back to the kitchen to find the stove open. Long black hairs hang listlessly from its inside grate. A dash of red graces its handle, half a kiss. He starts to feel sick again, feels his shirt stick painfully against his armpits, oh god, how his head whirls and aches in this his monochrome home! He tries to focus on the dead black hairs, control his spiralling vision, but there’s too many, and his knees knock together as the TV grows deafening, defying.

A knock at the door. He wades through the static to reach it. 

Outside, the rain tears heavy across the battered shingles. He opens the door. He has to squint to see her. She blends into the forest’s gray pines, shifting in and out of focus with each slight movement. Her blue eyes are misplaced raindrops. She wears too small mary janes and her black hair in a curled bun. She’s dressed for the confessional. 

He welcomes her in. Asks her name, her age, to which she replies, “I’m eight again. You know me.”

“That’s funny,” he says. “You remind me of her.”

“I tried to tell you,” says the little girl, stepping inside. Her body now flickers in and out of the gray peeling walls, the dead eyed furniture. “But sometimes my mouth zips shut.”

“Why are your eyes so blue?” he asks, following her to the kitchen. She leaves no footprints in her wake, no trace in the thick, thick dust.

“Don’t you remember?” she replies, bending over to check the stove. The hair now sprawls across the stove’s bottom and hangs like a veil from its mouth. The TV shuts off. “I grew them myself, though, if you must know.”

“You didn’t grow them. Your mother did,” he corrects her.

Another knock at the door. “I’ll get it,” she says. The hairs are sprouting from the walls now. He feels as though wires wind behind his eyes. He hangs in the kitchen doorway as she dances through the furniture, humming her way to the gash of a door. She opens it, grinning, and--

Crack.

Harry awakes with a start. His hands clamber to his chest, pressing down hard to quell his haggard breaths, but he only breaths harder, faster, until his lungs squeeze tight and his arms quiver. He lays this way for several minutes, eyes squeezed shut and ache only growing, until his heartbeat slows and his breathing sifts slowly to a seaside lull. He then sits up. Lightheaded, he holds a hand to his head and steadies himself against his nightstand. The moments passes. He stands. His hands still shake.

He wishes the church hadn’t closed last July.

Harry fumbles for the wall, then, holding onto it like a savior’s sleeve, follows it to the lightswitch. He hesitates before flicking it, momentarily terrified that long black hairs will seep from his dresser drawers and her blood will soak through his skin, his carpet. He closes his eyes before turning on the light, and only opens them once he is sure the floor is dry. 

Faded wallpaper, scattered pills on the dresser, drawers still shut. Hairless. He takes a deep breath. She has not snuck out of his dreams, like he fears her mother once did, with her nails all cracked and her breath choking ashes on his bared throat. His hands shake as he buttons his pajama shirt. Water. Yes, that’s what he needs. He’ll line the glasses up like shots, he thinks as he shuffles to the bathroom. Down them like Janis had grimaced, swallowing whiskey like motor oil--shut up, Harry. If he thinks about it he’ll crumble, but he must get her affairs in order, he remembers. He’ll have to dig through her room today, make a shoebox for her Slateport grave; he’ll lock up her trinkets in a steel locker tombstone. Does he have a picture? He thinks on this for a moment, then frowns.

He doesn’t even own a camera. 

Head hanging heavy, he opens the bathroom door. He looks in the mirror.

“Oh my god,” Harry whispers. 

His hair has gone completely white. His murky eyes have run through an artist’s purifier, bluer than cyanide, bluer than the sapphires on his mother’s choker, bluer than the eyes of someone from a dream he has already forgotten. An odd smile spreads across his lips. He reaches for his razor. He drags it across his chin. He stares into his reflection for nearly a minute, eyes squinted into his exposed skin. He hasn’t seen it in years. He’d forgotten what it looks like.

He runs back to his room. He checks his clock. Two minutes. He returns to the bathroom, breathing hard, eyes bright. 

“It hasn’t grown back!” he cries. “It hasn’t grown back!”


	13. What Anna Found

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _my daddy's got a gun, my daddy's got a gun_

On the evening of October 21st, 1956, Harry Hart paces his room in a deranged state. Though he has always despised the arrangement of his furniture, he especially loathes it now. His blackwood dresser’s single unrolled drawer grins lopsidedly at him, and its worn knobs watch him dully with the glazed stare of a drunk who returns to the bar night after late night until his wallet looms as empty as his stomach. He hates the way his carpet’s pattern milfers about, always out of focus like his wife’s camera lens. Daily, she’d worn it around her neck. She had paraded it to their neighbors, the Jameson’s, as though it were a second engagement ring. “He promised me,” Deborah had whispered to Mrs. Jameson when she’d thought Harry wasn’t looking, “that if I could sit through another one of his dreadful camping trips, he’d buy me this _darling_ camera. Doesn’t its strap match my eyes?”

The camera had been so light when he’d first bought it. The clerk at the convenience store said they’d had ‘em special made, on account of the war. They used a lot less material, or something like that. Harry had zoned out, as he was apt to during long sales spiels, of which he, being of similar profession, had spun more times than he could count. When asked whether or not he’d like to make the purchase, he’d nodded, grin bursting beneath his thin mustache. The clerk had grinned back like Harry had listened, then had proceeded to meticulously wrap the camera in mauve paper, as Harry had requested. After bidding the clerk farewell, Harry had walked home, one hand clutching his umbrella tight and the other tucked to his left side, packaged camera enclosed between his arm and his ribcage. It had weighed so little that when a mighty gust rushed through the street, he’d feared Deborah’s new camera would be whooshed up with it and deposited somewhere in the ocean.

It had weighed much heavier on his slow trek to Slateport, where he deposited it in a small metal locker. They called it a grave. We’re all already buried, they’d said. The dead get to go up to the sky, where they’re supposed to go, and we stay down here. Think of it as a burial shrine, I don’t know, like the Egyptians. Pay up, that’s a good man. Don’t frown, sir--you’re disrespecting the dead.

Is it possible for the dead to disrespect the living? Kill them, even? Harry’s hands tremble as his daughter’s clasp around his throat. Just down the apartment hall lays the child’s corpse, enshrined in Janis’s musty blankets and that peeling wisteria wallpaper. He’d left for a smoke--five minutes, he’d told Wisteria as the girl sat perched on the arm of Deborah’s old rocking chair, wings tucked tightly--suspiciously, now that he thinks back on it--to her sides. She’d nodded with that bored expression of hers, heavy-lidded and lips slightly parted, as if she had something to say but it’d died right before rolling from her tongue. 

Wisteria had apologized profusely after they’d found Anna, twitching like a broken television set on the kitchen floor with a needle jabbed in her arm and Janis’s purse gutted beside her. The quiver in her voice made him think that she hadn’t said sorry to anyone in a long, long while. 

They’d hauled the child to Janis’s bed, whereupon Wisteria had said she was sorry again, so fucking sorry, and Harry had told her to go home. He would see her tomorrow, but not now. Not after another.

“I think I know why he killed her,” said Wisteria before leaving, and as she left the room Harry had noticed the little black book peeking from between her wing and her armpit and his stomach sank so deeply with suspicion he feared it would pass through the earth.

He fiddled in his pocket for his ancient pack of cigarettes. As he’d struggled with its lid, he screamed for Ernest, begged him to bring a hot water washcloth but the child protested. “The cocoon is hatching!” Ernest cried and Harry swore at him something vile, unrepeatable and of course Ernest cried, he always fucking cries. Harry laid a hand on Anna’s forehead and cursed his daughter’s goddamned name, the goddamned witch. He feels her nail pulling up on his eyelid as if she’s preparing him for surgery; he shudders and jams a cigarette between his lips. The syringe had had Anna’s name scrawled in marker across its shaft--had she been jealous of his taking in of Anna, or was it typical Janis carelessness, poised recklessly with pen-sword in hand and indecipherable message scrolling behind her glazed yellow eyes? 

He’d placed a hand on Anna’s feverish forehead, and suddenly she shot up in bed, baby brown eyes wider than the Pacific. “Anna!’ he whisper-cried. Her lips parted and her cheeks paled ghastly ghostly white and he swore she whispered something--! 

Anna collapsed back upon her pillow, and her red hair spilled into spools beneath her head. In the living room, Ernest screamed something nasty, and her breathing shivered and shuddered and then, like a ghost retreating to its grave, it stopped.

And he’d done nothing to save her. 

He thinks back to her corpse on the bed, and his useless hands quiver around his ears and his morbid furniture looks on, silent. His eyes dart towards the mirror in hopes that the wallpaper has swallowed him up, but each time he finds his sunken face, his unfamiliar blue eyes, his aged white hair. He’s let another one die, they goddamn always die; he’s going to Hell this time, but he says that every time, every single time like a goddamned fool. He paces the room again. He feels Janis’s bloodshot eyes on his back, drawing a target on his hunched shoulders. He’d barely condemned Steven, let alone stalked him to his luxury apartment, where he should have laid in wait behind his four-cushioned sofa as he brushed his teeth and straightened his nightcap, and then, as the wretched man would drift off to sleep, Harry would wrap his dirty hands around his pale throat. He’s going to Hell, if not for leaving her unavenged then for this, this death of a child under his very watch!

He pauses, then rushes to the blackwood dresser, yanks his nightshirts and belts from its drawers. There is one thing he can do, yes, one last thing!

He opens the third drawer and pauses. His eyes narrowed then widen. His fingers itch for this metal blessing he’d thought he’d forgotten. He shoves it into his back pocket, and a smile spreads across his face.

Perhaps, he thinks darkly, he can do two.

++

The first time she wakes a rosary tickles her face, breathes frigid breath over her fevered forehead. Choked up Harry tells her, voice gruffer than an addict’s, “you’re a stupid girl, Anna. You’re so fucking stupid, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Anna doesn’t know what that means, but there’s a humming in her ears and it sounds like Own, bubbling through her veins; her fingers are still boiling past their natural limitations into the borderless hands of God, scorching her bedspread into rivers into spiels. An expensive purse lurked half-opened in the fluorescent fridge light. Pick it open. Wisteria’s royal navy feather wings lack fingers, but you’ve got them. They’re ugly, but their knife nails shred fabric instinctively, unquestioningly, but delicately, like a seamstress’s scissors. A gift. Janis left you a gift.

Dust sprinkles holy freckles over her nose. “After Deborah died, I threw my rosary into the lake like a melodramatic fool,” whispers Harry, voice cigarette carton hoarse, “but last night we thought you’d died and I tore the whole apartment apart searching for hers--the one Deborah left, I mean. It didn’t do anything, though. You kept screaming and screaming and I--” his voice drops, “--I can never do anything to stop it.”

“I’m sorry for snapping,” he whispers.

The beads stop trembling, and she imagines he’s clutching them tight, steadied in his self doubt. Her eyes, blinded by single bulb sunspots, can’t see him stooped at her bedside, shoulders hunched, head bowed deeply as though ghosts’ chilled hands have released the notches of his neck. The room hangs above her like a heavy-headed dust bowl. Faded wisteria wallpaper cracks and peels into ceiling corner cobwebs, but they’re melting together up, up, up and away-- she wants to find the color but it’s always gray in Hoenn, always gray in the monochrome neon city. She squints and it hurts and there’s no window, she remembers. Harry’s never had a window. Her hands bubble pop burn--oh, how her head pounds timpanis! She thinks she sees frolicking colors in the hanging dusts, but then they flash to gray and she’s forgotten what she’s seen before it has even vanished. 

The second time she wakes more bodies loom over her. She thinks she recognizes the chubby-cheeked boy on the left, but he’s wearing a stupid bunny-eared hat and the light doesn’t quite reach his eyes. There’s curly-haired Wisteria with an apology on her lips and a creature-child buzzing in the air behind her, bulging compound eyes swiveling to focus on Anna’s charred palm; his eyes are stationary but his limbs twitch madly, lips perpetually puckered, as though he has a straw forever propped between them. She shivers as he speaks with a hollowed out voice, a boy’s but so alien that her knees jamble against each other. His unnatural eyes start to swivel around and around and around, so she shuts hers, and in a frightened fireball cough tells him to go away.

“Where’s Harry?” she cries. Smoke trails from her nostrils, and the room grows hazy and her friends lose faces before they had names. 

“H-he’s just in the bathroom,” Wisteria whispers weakly, distantly, as though her voice has been diluted by the smoke-stench and the thickening haze. “Um, Anna, I’m-- I brought you some soup from home. My, um, my--Simon made it. It’s heating up on the stove.”

“When is he coming back?” Anna’s voice is so small she fears it has slipped through her ghastly fingers. They creep across the bed like scorched ivy, too long and too sharp and they burn, how they burn! 

“He got really nervous last night,” says Ernest. His voice bounces off the mirror and echoes between her ears. “You stopped breathing for a minute. I wasn’t there, though, cos Chase was hatching--I’m really sorry, Anna, but you gotta understand. I didn’t seem much of Harry, just heard him shouting at me, until he got up and went to the kitchen. He said he needed to take a nap, I think. I don’t know what happened out there--” he’s fading out now and her head is ringing, ringing, ringing, “--but he’s been shaking all night, and he keeps on muttering things, bad things.”

Her eyes crack open to find Ernest’s head hung, his little thin lips trembling. “I kept putting wet towels on your forehead, but you didn’t get better and then--” Anna rolls her head to the side and gasps. At the repeated sight of the little creature buzzing at Ernest’s shoulder, she loses track of talk and smoke and questions, sees only those pursed lips sucking raspy breaths and its little nubs-- _are those fingers sprouting from his ribs, or feelers_?--pressing at the fabric of his frilled, frayed blouse. His tiny fingers crawl against the yellowing frills, and she suddenly feels the gravity of her witch’s hands, and the little pops of heat beneath her bubbling palms and the weight of her lost little farmhouse pressing against her knees and her screwed shut eyelids. 

She imagines herself scuttling through the ceiling of the little room, with its wandering wisteria wallpaper and hovering haze puffing constantly from her smokestack nose. Then she digs through ascending apartments, through their mattresses, stagnant fish tanks, and dusty musty wine closets. With her claw hands vicious trowels, she breaks the surface in a halo of worms and Nebraska gray-brown soil. She trip-runs to her farmhouse, golden daylight (she remembers daylight faintly, but only faintly, and only in short spurts) streaking the backs of her knees. Anna attempts to knock at the door, but her claws scrape its fresh paint and leave gashes in the wood. There’s a cry from upstairs, by the landing window. She yells for her mother, but Daddy’s rushing from the shed with a shotgun, and he’s shouting. “That’s not my daughter!” he screams and the whole world hears him and furious he cocks the trigger--and she’s ugly, she’s ugly, she’s ugly!

“Where’s Harry?” Anna cries once more. 

In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet slams shut. 

“Where is he?” cries Anna, louder. 

Footsteps rush from the bathroom tile to the carpet. Harry hangs in the doorway for a moment, catches his haggard breath on a snag in his shirt collar. Through the haze he sees only the tall short silhouettes of Wisteria and Ernest, but he cannot find the form of the buzzing child in his daughter’s child blouse, nor can he find Anna, Anna! He’s imagining things again, he thinks, as his stomach drops and he feels that terrible ache rising again. He’s falling into his daughter’s habits-- smoking cigarette after yellowed cigarette, downed a shot and a shot and a shot after finding the child-- only a child!-- breathless. Unsupervised for a moment and she stumbles upon goddamned Own, unsupervised for two and she’s gone cold, breathless like his daughter whose ashes surely coat the sour ground above. 

She’s probably in Hell now. He wonders if she thinks about him, or if she merely continues, listlessly, writing notes to lovers who will never call. 

“He’s here, Anna,” says Wisteria. “It’s okay.”

“Harry!” Anna refuses to open her eyes, to see the hideous child and her own boiling hands trembling train tracks on her thighs. “Harry, where are you?”

Harry rushes through the smoke, stumbling over packed cardboard boxes and a lone doll’s head, which at his kick rolls beneath the vanity. His arms stretch ahead of him, rambling through the haze for the safepost bedpost. He catches a handful of Janis’s stupid bunny hat-- Ernest’s now, she exists only in inheritances and your waking nightmares--and recoils violently, unwittingly curling his lip and tightening his jaw. Tremors quake the boy’s shoulders but he ventures ahead, hunting for the corpse’s voice. He hears her little raspy breaths, smells the fire scorching from her feverish fingertips. He finds the harsh, jagged outline of her witch’s hands and with seldomly expressed paternal instinct, presses his hand against hers, but it burns, how it scorches! He snatches his hand away and yowls as Ernest’s gasp tithers through the smoke. “Have I hurt you?” Anna cries.

“No,” says Harry as he cradles his burnt hand to his chest, “no, no, no!”

“Then why are you crying?” asks Anna. 

_She’s alive, my god, she’s alive_! The miracle child, whose little breaths rasp and rasp hoarse and burned but alive. 

“I’m just very much relieved, that’s all,” says Harry, throat tight. “That’s all, really.”

“We thought you were really dead,” says Ernest, and she gets the keen sense that he’s told her this before, but haze clogs her memory like it clouds the ceiling, heavy and unyielding.

“How, um, how are you feeling?” asks Wisteria. She shuffles from foot to foot, eyes avoiding Anna’s.

Anna coughs and a spell of fire leaps from her throat to the bedsheets. She screams, but Ernest, as if on cue, spits a stream of water on its scorches. He grins for a moment as the steam crosses his face, and he tugs on his hat’s ears. “I’m getting pretty good at this,” he says, still smiling. He sticks his thumb up at her. “You should be proud of me, just like I’m proud of you for making it through that!”

Weakly, Anna smiles. “I’m very proud of you, Ernest.”

“I didn’t mean anything bad to happen, honest!” Wisteria bursts. Her lip wobbles and she glances away quickly, her cheeks burning. “I don’t have hands or anything, so I, um, I”--she tucks her wings tightly to her side, shakes her head as if shaking her nerves into place--”I couldn’t tell she’d sewed that Own into her purse’s lining. Hell, she didn’t seem like the kinda lady who even knew how to sew. I didn’t even--I didn’t even think about it.”

“I didn’t think much either,” says Anna. Out of the corner of her eye she catches the curve of her clawed finger, dangling dangerously off the top of her bent knee. She swallows, hard. Her throat burns. “Janis told me that she left me a gift, and I just thought...I just thought if she left it for me, it would be good for me. So it’s not your fault, Wisteria. Just a whole lotta mine, I guess.”

“But I coulda done something about it, if I’d had hands or something or if I had, I dunno--”

“If you hadn’t stolen her purse in the first place?” snaps Harry, but his face softens at the widening of Anna’s eyes. Quietly, he continues. “When the dead die, some things should die with them.”

 _Like Steven Stone_ , he thinks, and a vicious lump forms in his throat.

Wisteria opens her mouth to reply, but the doorbell’s ring cuts her off. She whips her head in its direction, silver pistol wavering in her mind, sending quivers through her knees. She glances at Harry, but he’s already creeping towards the front door with his hand reaching for his pocket. She starts to follow but he raises a hand, mouths “stop.” She narrows her eyes.

Slowly, he pulls his long lost gun from his pocket, places his shaking finger on the trigger with his jaw clenched and knuckles a horrid white. He swallows and that hideous crack echoes through his mind, but he hears the children whispering and so he steels his hand and ignores his terrified mind. 

He takes a deep breath and opens the door.


	14. October; Tabitha Horace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _So Hale-Bopp, Hail Mary, hail Hagia Sophia,  
>  O it was a lonely, lonely winter_

He could have plucked her from her selfish-selfless wallowing, plucked her like an unripened grape and led her, boisterous but unquestioning, to the lake’s edge, where instead of drowning her like he’d dreamed they would talk honestly, like real adults. They would have talked with the fossil maturity of old stones, then, with raising, tremulous voices, spoken of Old Stone himself. 

“I’m just feeling very overwhelmed right now,” he’d say, and she’d nod like she was drunk, because she was always drunk, even when she wasn’t.

“And you wouldn’t understand, because you’ve never had a need for anything,” Janis would say flippantly, and he’d think about dunking her head in the still water, but he wouldn’t do it, no, he’d never kill anyone. That’s what he’d always told himself, and then he’d opened her little black book and seen those little black letters scrawled out like a family recipe, and he’d felt a great ugly pit split behind his eyes.

But here he would cross his legs and say softly, without a hint of jealousy, “I have a great many needs, but I’ve got them under control.”

“I had to eat,” she’d say, and then she’d talk too much. “You sometimes forgot to pay for dinner, you know, and then the waitress would chase me out with a broomstick, and I’d tell her, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Jane, but I’m in love with a man who loves every goddamned brick of his city but understands none of its citizens, so here’s a few dimes for a tip, Miss Jane--it’s all I have, Miss Jane. Don’t be sour with me, you know we’re both impoverished and hungry.’ Now, typically I’d feel charitable, giving a few dimes to that poor women, but not when you could have bought her the world. You’re looking at me like I’m lying, but you, you’re always pretending that you’re mediocre and you love me and God knows what else, but it’s fine, because I love you.” She’d watch him pretend he hadn’t heard her. She’d swallow hard, then flick her cigarette. “You’ve got two beautiful eyes, but God forbid you use them, Steven. God fucking forbid.”

“I won’t cry over you,” Steven would have said to her then. But now, now his heart races and his stomach churns and he heaves over the toilet again, coughing and sputtering like a rusted engine. 

+++

 _He’ll kill me first_ , thinks Harry as he stares down the empty hall, index finger inching towards the trigger, heels itching to sprint to his room and lock the door behind him. _Then_ , he thinks, _Wisteria will shout something foul, and he’ll shoot her in the knee. She’ll start screaming legitimately then, and he will kill her just to shut her up. The children will cry; he’ll laugh at them and everything they’re afraid of. He’ll tell them that if they lie down on the floor, he will let them live. They, being children and inherently insensible, will follow his directions. He will shoot them both in the back of the head, and then depart swiftly for his luncheon at two_.

We’re all going to die, thinks Harry as slow footsteps stalk down the hall and the lightbulb above flickers, and flickers, and flickers. The skywalk door wheezes open, then coughs shut, and the footsteps continue, muffled and faded and eventually absent. Harry takes a deep breath, lowers his gaze from the wall’s peeling paint to his scuffed oxfords. 

On the floor lies a business card. 

“What the hell,” he mutters as he picks it up.

“Is that a coupon?” asks Ernest, head peeking from between pillows, which he, in his mad frenzy to avoid Steven’s silver pistol, has fashioned into a small fort. “We used to clip those before the grocery store shut down.”

Harry reads the card’s text, and his face goes pale.

“You okay there, old man?” asks Wisteria, hanging in the bedroom doorway. Anna stands beside her, leaning against the frame and breathing shallow, still feverish.

“It’s from the Mauville Main,” he says quietly. 

Wisteria leans her head against the frame. “Shit,” she sighs, and she feels the black book in her pocket, light and heavy and opened by her only once, forever only once.

“They’ve written a note on the back. They say they’d like me to visit, to get Janis’s affairs in order.” He feels her eyes burrowing into his back, and he swallows, hard. His hands tremble. “I need to go.”

“What’re they going to ask for?” asks Wisteria. She thinks of the book’s contents. She shudders at the thought of Harry reading it, or, perhaps worse, fully realizing its implications. “Money? You don’t have any of that, and they sure as hell don’t, either.”

“It would be proper,” says Harry faintly. 

He slips past Wisteria and the shaking children into Janis’s room, and falls to his knees on the hardwood of his daughter’s floor, where he stays, shaking, until he no longer feels her hands around his throat. He then shuffles through the things beneath her bed. He’s not sure which are important, only that they will be buried in her place, in a small locker in Slateport. He finds an old shoe, a rabbit doll, and a crumpled crayon drawing beneath a box of dusty church dresses. He tucks them into a shoebox and tucks it beneath his arm. She’d probably be embarrassed of him--memorializing her by a childhood that he, Harry knows she would say, had valued even less than she had.

They set off for The Main at four. Harry leads the way, overcoat buttoned to his throat, shoebox coffin clutched in his two gloved hands. Little Anna clip clops close behind him. Her fever burns sweat through her thin sweater, and under the harsh glare of the neon lights, she feels a constant shiver in her bones. After her clambers Ernest, whose chilled hands clutch at the ears of his hood, and Wisteria, who buries her chin deep into her mother’s wool scarf. The cocoon ( _Chase_ , Anna remembers, but as she catches his black-eyed stare her stomach falls, and his name chases it down) flutters about Ernest’s shoulder.

The city is growing colder. Above ground, Anna’s sure, the leaves have spiralled from the trees and mothers sew their children Halloween costumes. But in Hoenn, there are no children, only an aching, lip-shivering cold which seeps through the ground and into their bowed necks. _At least there’s no wind_ , thinks Anna as they stalk through skyway after skyway, silent and hunched. 

From across the city comes a low rumble. “Aqua, probably,” mumbles Wisteria. “They target over there a lot. A lot of kids, or a lot of Own. At least, that’s what Simon says.”

“Who’s Simon?” asks Anna. 

Wisteria rubs her head against her wing. The neon light plays a blush across her cheeks. “He’s cool.”

They continue wordlessly, down winding apartment complexes, past bulletin boards thumb-tacked with outlaw notices (“Archie, medium build,” Anna mouths to herself, “and a tall girl, Shelly.”), past grinning Own advertisements and overflowing trash cans, past shattered glass and rusty-locked doors. Behind these crumbling doors sleepwalkers, all Owned up and glaze eyed, shamble listlessly. Harry eyes each, checks with practiced eyes for cracked locks, shadows beneath the door. In his pocket, his hand clutches his gun. 

A few minutes pass, or an hour. Anna doesn’t feel the cold, but the others shiver despite their coats. “I want a blanket,” mumbles Ernest. 

“We’ll be there soon,” says Harry. He buries his chin into his coat collar, sighs heavily into it. “It’s a long walk.”

“I’ll say,” says Wisteria. The skyways have all blended together, commercial faces blending into one generic grin, musty, deep earth scent broken only by the occasional hopeful perfume. Anna’s little feet ache. They’ve entered a different part of the city, she judges by the shifting skyline, and the nearer smokestacks. 

Here, the buildings creak and sigh beneath them, and the halls reek of fresh paint. Scallops have been carved into the wall’s trim. The carpet has been ripped out, replaced with mint green, polished tiles. Here no notices hang across the windows; only paintings, as simple and metropolitan as finely applied lipstick.

“This wasn’t here last time,” says Harry. 

“That’s not art,” says Wisteria drolly. “That’s a dot on a canvas.”

“If it’s on the wall,” replies Ernest, “it’s probably art. You know, Wisteria, I think it’s kind of pretty.”

“Anna could fucking do that,” snaps Wisteria.

“My circles are pretty wobbly,” says Anna quietly. Smoke wisps from her nostrils. She feels like one of Harry’s half-smoked cigarettes, quiet and observant and charred--an abandoned chimney stack on the corner of an ashtray. 

“I’ll show you how to draw a good one sometime!” says Ernest, elbowing her side. “First, you gotta draw a face--I’m pretty bad at those. Gran always said they were pretty good, but she’s blind, so you gotta take that with a grain of salt. Then you erase the chin and the eyes, and the nose and all that stuff, and--oh, look! This painting’s got a plaque on it!”

Wisteria rolls her eyes. “Preschool art show, confirmed. Come on, Ernest, let’s go. Everyone’s tired.” 

“Tabitha Horace,” reads Ernest. “The Carnival.”

“That circle sure as hell isn’t a carnival, and we sure as hell don’t have time to sit around debating this. Ernest, come on. ”

“I think the circle is a carousel! I saw one of those in a book once!” He pokes Anna’s arm. “Have you ever been on one?”

“In Omaha, once,” replies Anna. “It spun very fast, and I got sick.”

They cross into the next skyway. Someone has draped white lace curtains over the windows; the neon light filters through, casts a still life filigree across the wall and their sallow faces. Anna steps slowly, fever flushing her cheeks. She feels as though she could be in a painting, like the ones in her mother’s travel books. A vacation painting, all tethered together by dappled brushstrokes. A Greek painting of girls on a cliff by the sea, where Anna’s ribbons would stream in the implied wind and she would linger on the brink, pensive, almost pretty.

“These curtains are cool,” says Ernest. “I feel like art.”  
Perhaps a year ago, Anna would have liked to star in a painting. The cocoon (Chase, Anna! she scolds herself sternly, in Harry’s gruff voice) buzzes behind her, and she shivers. She tries to hide her claws behind her skirt, but they stick out. They always stick out.

From the building next door comes a great, terrible howl. Ernest rushes to the skywalk window, presses his face into the spiderweb lace and peers through its cracks. Harry hangs against the wall, hand clutching his gun in his pocket, arm frozen around his shoebox coffin.

“What do you see?” cries Anna. 

Glass shatters, a man cries out (loud at first then fading fast), then static crackles over the loudspeakers, permeates the room like a gas. Ernest stumbles backwards, eyes wide and mind shuddered back to that narrow classroom and those arms, whirling and wailing and whirling.

With the creaking voice of a dusty accordion, a man warbles through the static. “I am Tabitha Horace, the ringmaster of this corner of Hoenn--thank you to my darling Maxie for gifting me this ordinance. Though he said it was to get me out of his hair, I know that in his heart of hearts, he loves me dearly.

Credits aside, I would like to cordially welcome you to my humble district! Well, I’d like to welcome you all--except that girl with the wings. I hate you.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you, too,” mutters Wisteria.

He shrieks over the static, “I’ve hidden a dozen microphones beneath that lace, I’ll have you know, and I’ll have you know that I’ve been watching you with little cameras like little eyes!”--A deep breath. He continues musically, higher-pitched.--“Oh, yes! I would like to apologize to the little boy in the rabbit hood! I’d asked that splotch on the pavement to dance for me, but he grew tired, and I became weary of his exhaustion. A sleeping man cannot entertain--we agree on this, yes?”

“Nah,” says Wisteria, glancing drolly at the window. She wonders how difficult it would be to break, and if she could carry them all atop her xylophone spine--or if she would snap, beneath their weights.

Harry takes a deep, shuddering breath. His shoebox weighs heavy, and his jaw clenches at the thought of this journey prolonged, this makeshift casket left unburied for another cold hour. “We have business to attend to,” he snaps, motioning vaguely at the wall with his free hand.

“He threw a man out the window,” whispers white-faced Ernest. “Keep your voice down.”

“That’s a shabby coffin,” says the loudspeaker man. “I keep a collection of artists, each with a beautiful hideous beast howling inside them, who I’m sure with some persuasion could fashion you something less--erm, how should I put this? _Sad_. We could strike up a deal! You have the clothes of an unemployed businessman, and I have the firepower of a king. Yes, a lovely deal will be struck! How’s about this? The rabbit boy seems artistically inclined, yes? A true patron of the arts, an understanding patron of the abstract, of reality shrunk into simple geometry! Yes, how’s about this?--you trade me the boy, and I won’t release my masterpiece. 

Not because it is poorly made, mind you--I see that winged girl curling her lip. Quit it, child, you look like a peasant. But because it is a ferocious creature with a brain bubbling deep with sweet, sweet Own. I call it Groudon, once two hulking men (Gordon and Raul, I must always credit my subjects)--now one, towering and hungry and beastly. You still look unconvinced. Shall I continue?”

Ernest clenches his little, trembling fists, eyes wide. Chase alights on his shoulder, great black eyes swivelling scathingly at Anna’s sallow face. Anna glances at him, then looks away quickly, stomach churning.

“You can shove your masterpiece up your ass,” snaps Wisteria. “Right, Ernest?”

Ernest yelps.

“We’re not losing anyone else,” says Harry lowly, and the static snarls to a halt.


	15. Bit by Bit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _far away from the people on the ground_

From inside the cracked plaster walls of the skyscraper ahead, they hear the clanking snarl of metal against metal, and the rickety snake crawl of a rollercoaster climbing its wooden track. Then the floor-shaking rumble of Groudon’s first step. Inside Janis’s shoebox coffin, a pair of rusted hairpins rattles. Harry clutches it tight to his chest. 

Before him lay two options: first, they could rush headfirst into the lumbering, Own-intoxicated jaws of this creature, where likely they will die battered unrecognizable and left to bleed out on the grimy floor. He purses his lips, sighs. Should they succeed, however—he grips the shoebox tighter—he’ll no longer feel her hands squeezing his throat, how her nails dig vicious or frightened into his skin, as if clawing their way up from her grounded, scattered ashes--!

Perhaps if he apologizes as the locker door slams shut, she’ll ghost the gilded halls of a more luxurious apartment. She’ll creep on its silver-haired owner as he sleeps, his breath the only thing breezing the still, dead air. She’ll wrap her jilted hands around his pretty neck and squeeze until his eyes bulge and his thick lashes flutter fast faster then slowing, drooping as his shoulders fall limp. 

_Shit_.

He tries to remember better times. Once Deborah, Janis, and he rented a sailboat from the booth of a thin-faced, scowling man on the docks of Lake Michigan. The wind had hustled over the July water. As Harry haggled, Deborah straightened Janis’s collar, chastised her for slipping away to examine the wares of a street jeweler. “Chicago’s a dangerous city to get lost in,” she said to her, smiling because she was frightened. (Here he thinks of her smiling at the burglar with the beady eyes, how before he shot her she asked him breathless, tittering terrified, if he wanted crackers with his tea.) Janis pleaded innocent. She hadn’t wandered off—Mother had blended into the jostling crowd, and she’d gotten lost, she said, so very lost amidst buildings that did not yet scrape the sky. She held up a small hand. The jeweler wanted to sell her a ring, she said. Garnet gem, silver band. (And here he remembers the rings studding her fingers like faceted piano keys; how they hovered trembling over the red gape in her stomach.) Harry shudders.

He didn’t used to think like this.

_The situation at hand_ , he reminds himself. He glances back at the children. Bunny ears Ernest tugs his hood over his head, knees knocking. The insect child buzzes at his shoulder with hands wrung into knots. Wisteria watches the loudspeaker intently, brown eyes narrowed, and wide-eyed Anna lingers at Harry’s side. Her feverish shoulders tremble. She tries to put her claw-hands over her eyes, but recoils from their heat. She looks up at him and Harry grips the shoebox tighter. He thinks he sees a shadow slink past the lace curtain. He gulps. Just a trick of the light, the ever-stagnant neon light. He smoothes his hands over his pockets, steels himself. He should swiftly deliver her to her locker-grave, yes. But at the thought of Tabitha’s hulking creature, his hands tremble. The children, too, huddle shaking and shivering. His face softens. Were they to walk into its deathtrap path, he wouldn’t be the only one splattered across the pavement…

Anna taps his arm. He starts. Her lip trembles as the floor shakes. “What are we going to do?”

Harry sighs, pulls the shoebox closer to his side. He swallows hard. _Sorry, Janis_. 

“We’re going home.” 

+++

Anna roots her eyes to the floor as they wander through the aching halls of the Oldale Apartments. She counts the stains in the carpet. One red, one cyanide blue, another flapjack yellow. They must be silent, Harry had said, until they get home. 

Anna thinks to pass the time.

She thinks first, as she knows she should, about her mother and father; whether her absence has weathered their faces, if they still place hide and seek without her, and if they’d still smile at her when the light hits her hands. She wonders if they’ve searched hard for her. _Hoenn can’t be a secret_ , she thinks as her stomach ties itself into knots. “Harry,” she whispers.

“What?” he answers, voice low, eyes darting from door to silent door.

“Do people up there know about Hoenn?”

“Yes.” Then, roughly, “But we’re better off forgotten.”

“There’s nobody up there,” Ernest blinks. He scrunches up his face, scratches his cheek. “That’s what my dad said, and my dad knew everything, I’m pretty sure.”

“Dads don’t know shit,” Harry mutters.

They continue in silence. Anna counts the tiles on the ceiling. One, two, three, four. She pauses to squeeze her eyes shut as they pass a window. The harsh flapping of leathery wings plays behind her eyelids. Anna holds her breath. Her hands bubble and boil; she remembers that she cannot curl them into fists. 

“We’ll be home soon,” says Harry, almost apologetically.

Dust flutters Anna’s eyelashes awake. She squints up at the ceiling. Five, six, seven trembling tiles, molting their dust coats and spilling them into gray freckles across Anna’s sallow cheeks. They groan as they bend beneath the hulking weight of _something_ , something whose heavy breath blends into the tireless hum of the city’s neon lights. “Do you hear that?” Anna whispers to Wisteria.

“Hear what?”

“The breathing.”

Wisteria cocks her head to the side and purses her lips, listens hard. Her eyes widen. “Hey, uh, Harry?” she says. She tries to swallow her voice’s quiver, but her next sentence escapes in a squeak. “I think it followed us home.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Harry growls. 

_Two men in one body_ , thinks Anna. She tries to imagine it, but her mind cannot piece together hip and hip, or where their shoulders would have been sewed, like a shoddy seamstress’s revenge, in uneven, half-pulled stitches. Its formlessness sends her knobby knees knocking together. The ceiling’s groans deepen. 

“We’re fucked,” breathes Wisteria.

“Maybe if we’re quiet,” Ernest whispers, “we can sneak home.”

“We’ve got to go through the skywalk,” says Harry. “The doors creak.”

“Could we fight it?” buzzes Chase. He flutters at Anna’s shoulder. She recoils.

Wisteria shakes her head, glances nervously at the ceiling.

“I don’t feel like dying today,” Harry lies.

“If someone got the door, I could roll with Anna and Chase,” suggests Ernest. “I don’t think I could stretch big enough for you guys, though.”

“Harry, you can run fast, right?” asks Wisteria. “I mean, you’re, like, freakishly tall, so.”

“I outran a bear once,” says Harry. 

“You’re joking, right?”

“It was a really slow bear.”

“What’s a bear?” asks Ernest.

“It’s really fuzzy, and it eats honey and—“ begins Anna.

“You’ll learn when you’re older,” Harry says. He clears his throat. “Excuse me, but it’s getting closer and we haven’t moved an inch.”

Outside, the neon lights hum. A brief Own advertisement jingles on a speaker on the ground, then an old news recording begins. “The latest news story by Wallace Yates, detailing the tragic assassination of our late President Stone, will debut in the Hoenn Times on January 2nd, 1955. Papers will be delivered by 8AM. If you have any comments, please deliver them to Mr. Wallace Yates after tomorrow’s inauguration of President Stone’s surviving son, Steven Stone. Stay classy, Hoenn.”

The ceiling groans. Another puff of dust smatters Wisteria’s black hair grey. The tiles bend further down the hall now, creaking and wheezing as the creature approaches the stairs. Anna’s breath quickens. Her head spins. The stairs begin to moan under the thing’s weight. She looks up at Harry. He smiles weakly. “It won’t get you,” he says. Quieter, he adds, “Trust me.”

Wisteria nods at the door. Ernest gulps. 

They run. 

The faded wallpaper blurs past, flowers bleeding into pinstripes into plaster cracks. Their footsteps pound thunder against the carpet. The light flickers. Wisteria slams her shoulder into the skywalk door; it sputter-creaks open. Footsteps scream down the stairs, stumbling and heavy and viciously excited. They pile through the door as the breathing bursts into the hall, but Anna won’t look back, no, oh god, she can’t look back so she glances heart-a-pounding out the window, and there it is, there she sees it—

_The Beast_.

Her breath catches in her throat. “Oh my god,” Harry whispers. It had broken her arm first, she remembers, while reaching its soot-stained claws through the glass. Pain dizzy shattered bone tipsy she’d stumbled forward, feet crunching over broken glass, neon lights twisting and blurring as its black teeth gnashed, gnashed, gnashed! She’d fallen then, into and out of its embrace, hurtled knees-first towards the city’s floor, where she’d landed on the sharp tip of a syringe. As she fell, it had angled its hideous head towards the sky, bottleneck spine arched and trembling as though it had lost something very dear, but could not quite remember its name. The neon light mimed sunlight against its back. She had called it an angel. 

Ernest grabs her arm. “Anna, come on!” he cries. She stumbles after him, head turning to follow The Beast’s wings as they spread wide. 

“It’s going to kill me this time,” she whispers. Ernest grips her arm tighter. “I don’t want to die, oh god, oh god!”

The door crashes open. She catches Groudon in bouncing pieces—a swollen, bloated leg caught between flashes of her hair, two jaws that hang loose from their hinges, a lolling tongue, a hand without fingernails. And through the window, the Beast has taken flight, and its teeth are gleaming red purple green as it rushes past an advertisement. Ahead, Wisteria shoulders open the door. “We’re almost there,” Ernest says to Anna, but she’s staring hollow-eyed over her shoulder, lips gaping.

Ernest rushes through the door. He reaches back for her but she’s slow. Her daddy always said she was slow.

Harry shouts as the glass shatters. The floor crumbles beneath her feet.

Three things come to her as she falls:

First, that she hadn’t made her bed before they’d left, and how, by dying, she will be avoiding a strongly worded scolding from Harry.

Second, that she would very much prefer the lecture.

Her third thought is cut off by Ernest’s hand around her wrist. Wheezing and huffing, he slowly pulls her from her free-fall perch above the great dead neon city. Below, Groudon smacks against the floor, bathed in a funeral baptism of plaster dust and dirty glass. The Beast circles above his body, shrieking like a half-starved vulture. The nearby buildings draw their curtains and put out their lights.

They stand, five shaking and slack-jawed and tired things, leaning stunned against each other. Harry pats Anna’s head. Wisteria tries to settle her feathers. Ernest leans his head against the wall, tries not to cry. Chase sits on his shoulder. And the city lights hum on, and on, and on.

“Anna,” says Harry quietly, squeezing the shoebox to his side. 

“Yes?” she asks. 

“Please try to stay alive, okay?”

Anna nods. She still feels the city beneath her and the dead air’s creep across her neck. She shivers.

Harry clears his throat. “Let’s go home,” he sighs. “It’s taken long enough.”

“We’re still going to the Main tomorrow, right?” asks Wisteria. “Afterwards, you guys should come over for dinner. My mom and dad always manage something good. The kids could even hang out there while you do your business, Harry. It’d be nice for them to relax, and I dunno, run around and do kid junk. You know, Ernest, I think you’d get along great with my friend.”

“Is your friend super cool?” asks Ernest.

Wisteria grins. “He’s a loser.”

They turn to leave. Ernest asks Anna if she’s coming. No, Anna says, I need time to think, but come if I call, please, come if I call. Ernest gives her a thumbs up, and Wisteria slaps him lightly on the shoulder. 

“See you guys later.”

Anna sits on the floor for a while, beside the building’s now open mouth. She watches the advertisement across the street, how it flickers, how the people’s eyes flash open and closed, as if Hoenn left them time to blink, let alone grieve. The Beast’s shrieking whittles into whimpers. Anna wonders if it wants her to feel sorry for it. She flicks a shard of glass over the edge. _Serves it right_. 

A girl skips stones at the lake’s edge. She stands on her tiptoes to watch each one sink. After three skips, she grows tired, and leans against the crematorium’s cart to rest. There, she spots Anna. She waves and tries to shout hello, but is cut off by the news recording, replaying the story about that journalist man, Wallace Yates, and the president he’d found murdered, slumped over his breakfast omelet and the morning paper.

Anna waves back at the girl. “Hello!” she calls. 

In the distance, two men lean over an apartment balcony. They’ve propped the door open with a dictionary. Their coats are buttoned to their throats. The taller man offers the other a cigarette. He starts to cry.


	16. The Big Stupid Ocean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sorry about the scene transitions in this trash chapter @___@"""

“It’s not real,” says Ernest, sitting cross-legged at the kitchen table. A coloring book lays spread out before him. He grips his orange crayon like a carving knife, colors a librarian’s hair into a blazing wildfire.

“The ocean’s not a fairytale, Ernest,” calls Harry from the kitchen. 

“Have _you_ ever seen it?”

“Well, no,” replies Harry.

“Anna hasn’t seen it, Wisteria hasn’t seen it, Chase hasn’t seen it, you haven’t seen it, and I haven’t seen it. You know what that means?”

“What?”

“It’s not real.”

The ladle sloshes in the pot. Harry huffs loudly. “How do you think Christopher Columbus got to America?”

“With lies.”

“I think you mean he crossed the ocean,” Harry snaps. Ernest bets he’s stirring that soup all white-knuckled, with his face drawn into a sour pinch.

On the couch, Wisteria bursts into giggles. She leans over its back and holds out her wing. “High-five, little dude.”

Ernest swats her feathers. “Thanks, pal,” he says, giving her a salute.

Wisteria laughs. “I’m not your pal, buddy..”

“Awh, Wisteria, I thought we were friends. Way to bummer me out,” he pouts. To accentuate his utter desolation, he draws a raincloud over the librarian’s head. He points a chubby finger at it. “That’s how sad I am.”

“Boohoo.” Wisteria sticks out her tongue. “You draw pretty nice, though. Is that a pillow on her head?”

“It’s a raincloud!” cries Ernest. He snatches up the coloring book, presses it self-consciously to his chest. “Once you stop laughing at me, I’m going to make it so big it fills up the whole page, and then you’ll feel really sorry.”

+++

The first ghost lingers in smells and in instincts. Steven often catches him in stairwells-- a figureless puff of cigar smoke, a whiff of Indian ink, a vague shudder of peppermint shampoo. Upon catching his scent, Steven always finds himself caught unaware by the imagined iron furrow of Old Stone's brow and his ex-wrestler footsteps, lopsided and eager like an unrepentant hangman’s. He had had uneven legs, but he never let the city know that.

Without failure, Steven will apologize to the cold air. “Sorry,” he’ll say once, and then again:

“Sorry.”

+++

They sit crowded around the kitchen table, all but Wisteria slurping their soup. Harry has spread a map of the world across his placemat. He sighs and rubs his temples. “You see that whale in the blue part?” asks Harry. “They can only live in the ocean. Therefore, because whales exist, the ocean exists.”

“I don’t even know what a whale is! The blue means land, Harry!” shouts Ernest, shaking his spoon at Harry. “And even if there was a big stupid ocean, it probably burned up when the bombs went off! _Duh_!”

“Water doesn’t burn, Ernest. It evaporates,” says Wisteria. “There you go. Some science.”

“Thank you, Wisteria,” says Harry.

Ernest folds his arms over his chest. “I still don’t believe it.”

“I’ll show it to you someday,” yawns Anna. She sits cross-legged and sleepy-eyed, hair dappled white by her pillow’s stray feathers. Somehow she’s more tired after her nap than she’d been before.

Beside her, Wisteria stares at her bowl of soup. She bites her lip, jiggles her knee. “Are you okay?” asks Anna, tilting her head to the side.

“I-- I, uh, just don’t like eating in front of people,” replies Wisteria.

“Why not?”

“It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Do you burp a lot?” Anna giggles. “My mom burps a lot when she thinks I’m not paying attention.”

“Oh my god, my mom does the same thing,” says Wisteria. “But uh, nah, I don’t do that.”

“You’re changing the subject,” butts in Harry.

Wisteria’s feathers ruffle. “Quit eavesdropping, old man.”

“Hey there, I’m only fifty.”

“Okay, okay, whatever you say. Look, I just eat really weird. It’s an I-don’t-have-hands-so-I-gotta-do-shit-the-funky-way thing, and my dad already laughs at me enough about it, so”--she crosses her wings over chest then leans back in her chair--“can we just drop all of this, please?”

“Sure thing,” says Anna, sipping her soup. “Yeah.”

+++

Steven rendezvous with the second ghost at ten. He meets her in front of his bathroom mirror. With paper-mâché hands she climbs the notches of his spine, and with those barbed nails like claws she tightens the noose of his tie. The first time he had postponed the wedding, she had traded the ring for a gramophone.

“Sorry,” she’d said. “I thought you’d left me for him.”

She once told him that nobody really lived in Hoenn, not him and his ballroom chandelier, or his father and his lopsided gait, or even that woman who worked the Main’s poker tables who claimed she only ever rigged the cards for God. You can’t really live anywhere you can’t run away from, she’d said.

“ _I know why you keep running from me_.”

He looks for her in the mirror’s face, but finds only the deepening hollows of his cheeks and bluish purple half-moon whispers beneath his eyes. He leans against the bathroom wall; shivers crawl like hot breath over his shoulders. Sometimes she watches him while he sleeps.

The room is cold. His tie is crooked.

+++

Anna and Ernest lounge in the living room. Anna lies prostrate on the couch, her hair splayed like ivy beneath her head, and her legs dangling over the couch’s sunken arm. Ernest sets up a board of checkers on the coffee table. He asks her to play, but she declines. He asks her why not.

“I’m thinking,” she says, crossing her legs at the ankles.

“About what?”

She turns her head to the side. “You keep acting like there’s nothing up there.”

“That’s ‘cause there is nothing,” Ernest answers. He shuffles to the other side of the coffee table and starts to set the opposition’s side. “My dad came home from the factory one day, and he said to me, he said, ‘Ernest, my boy, it’s all gone.’ He looked like he’d been crying a lot, so I grabbed him Gran’s handkerchief. And he looked like he wanted me to cry, too, but I couldn’t. I’ve never even been up there. I’ve never even seen the sun or knew anyone but you who was up there, so I didn’t really have anything to cry about. He told me his sister must’ve died in the blast. Gran came running in then, screaming really loud about the Russians. She said it was all their fault the world was gone. We had a Russian neighbor. She didn’t go out much after that.”

“Ernest,” says Anna. _Careful_ , she thinks, _careful_. “There wasn’t a bomb.”

“The president said there was! He said there’s nothing left up there. No stars, no moon, no grass and no people. He said all that’s left is just us and the dirt.”

“Sure, there’s plenty of dirt up there, but there’s a moon so big it could swallow my house.” Anna stares at the ceiling. A fat-legged spider scuttles across it. “And there’s stars, loads of them. Sometimes Mother, Papa and I would lie down in the field behind our house, and Mama would name the stars and Papa would complain about mosquitoes. They’re really pretty. They’re like, okay—so your hood is covered in polka-dots, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Imagine all those polka dots up in the sky, thousands of them. Some of them are connected, Mama used to say. There’s a big dipper, a little dipper, and a star that always tells you where north is. And if you follow that star for a long, long time, you’ll end up in Canada, which Papa says isn’t as great as America. Mama went there once, though. She said she saw the night make a rainbow.”

“I just— I just, I--I can’t even picture it.” Ernest scratches his head. “I mean, sure my dad showed me pictures of up there, but it’s so crazy. It seems so open— a huge sky full of glowy polka dots, Harry’s big dumb ocean. It sounds like a story, not a real place.”

Anna taps his shoulder with her toe. She sticks out her tongue at him. “Weren’t you the one rambling about ghosts a few weeks ago?”

“Well, yeah, but they make more sense! Everyone up there is dead, and half of everyone down here is dying. Ghosts are just trying to fill all the empty they left, but the sky, well, it’s just one big empty. I think it’d be scary, living without a ceiling.”

Softly. “The world’s not as empty as you think.”

“Yeah?” He pulls his knees to his chest, rests his head upon them. His voice is thick. “But what about the bomb? The president told my dad there was a big bomb; and everyone died and that’s why they sealed all the latches. He said we were safe down here.”

“I wouldn’t really call Hoenn safe.”

“No.” His knees muffle his voice. “I wouldn’t either.”

“But up there, there’s a whole lot of people living just like us. Probably happier, though, and safer. There’s my mama and my papa and the milkman and the kids at school and the old woman down the road with her beautiful garden, and there’s loads of other people too that I don’t know anything about, but they’re there. And they’re all living, doing their things, going to school and eating mama’s pie and listening to the radio before dinner.” She can’t remember her mother’s face. She closes her eyes, bites her lip hard. “Without me.”

Ernest glances up. “Hey, are you crying?”

She sighs and wipes her eyes on her sleeve.

“I think you’d really like the stars.”

+++

“Your tie’s crooked,” says Wallace.

“Oh.” Steven swallows. “Yeah.”

Sad eyed and frigid fingered, Wallace tugs Steven’s tie loose, then eases it over his head. He undoes the knot before continuing. “You’ve been seeing her again.”

“Not like that.”

“Of course not like that-- she’s dead.” Wallace bites his lip, leans against the bar counter. They used to go here a lot, before Old Stone cast the first stone and the city lit coals beneath their suit jackets. “Sorry,” Wallace mutters. “That was uncalled for.”

“Just a little bit.” Steven lets him drape the tie around his shoulders. He stares at the wall as Wallace loops it. There had been a photograph of the owner there, just above the mahogany paneling. Steven can’t recall his face, only that he had posed with a collection of German liquors and often smelled like expired shaving cream.

Wallace kisses his forehead. “What was that for?” asks Steven.

“You looked really nervous.”

“I’m always nervous.”

He straightens Steven’s tie and tucks it into his jacket. “There. Gorgeous.”

“No, you.” Steven circles behind the bar. He hunts through the cabinet, fingers dancing past cobwebs and recipe books for their last half-bottle of whiskey. He finds it past the champagne and the cognac. He snags the shot glasses from beneath the counter, and then carefully lines each glass equidistant from the next.

“You know, even though your whole heir to the city gig has gone to shit, I still think you’d make an excellent bartender,” says Wallace, straddling a barstool. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. “Want one?”

“Light me up.” Steven leans over the counter. Wallace presses a cigarette between his lips, snap-flicks the light. He forgets to blink the smoke from his eyes. Steven takes a long drag. “I keep thinking about the little things. How he spent days storming in and out of the tailor’s, complaining about the uneven hem of his pants. How she hated being walked home. I keep thinking that maybe if I’d—“

Steven takes another drag, runs a hand through his unwashed hair. “I don’t really sleep anymore.”

“I know,” says Wallace. He traces a finger around his glass’s rim. His eyes root to the floor. Some days he misses the anonymity of the barroom bustle, the quiet found only during a strangers’ brawl. He swallows. “I, um, I--nevermind.”

Steven sighs. He pulls his jacket tighter, then picks up the bottle. “Should I pour the first shot, or do you want to do the honors?”

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been ongoing on the Nuzlocke forums since June 2014, so excuse the quality of the first few chapters!


End file.
